September 7, 2009

Help wanted: experienced symbologist needed at once

Dear Stephen: Oh dear. The precautions surrounding Dan Brown’s new book make the British Crown Jewels in the Tower of London look easily accessible. Perhaps I should reconsider my plans to store copies of our book in the garden shed. Seriously, though, I can see good commercial reasons for keeping Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol under wraps, to prevent piracy – something similar was done to protect each new Harry Potter book.

On the other hand, let’s face it, such elaborate secrecy must surely also be part of the hype. The risk is that, if the hype becomes exaggerated, the actual appearance of the book could prove an anticlimax. I understand this latest offering from Dan Brown is set in Washington, so it is less likely to suffer from the kind of geographical gaffe that helped discredit The Da Vinci Code, including such oddities of landscape as an aircraft descending over “the misty hills of Kent” – something similar to referring to “the flat plains of the Rockies.”

As we point out in our book, The Da Vinci Code was in the same tradition as the earlier non-fiction (in the purely technical sense) The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Dan Brown’s portrayal of the Catholic organization Opus Dei was beyond inaccurate; but Opus Dei sensibly traded on the massive publicity to get its genuine message across, so Dan Brown (and his fictional alter-ego, “Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon”) did it a favour in the long run.

If I am correctly informed, it looks as if, in his new book, the Freemasons rather than the Catholic Church are in the spotlight: Brown certainly knows how not to make friends and influence people, but he is laughing all the way to the bank. It appears that six million people in Britain alone thought that The Da Vinci Code was literally true – and they have the vote! Be very afraid. Yours, Gerald