The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (12 page)

Moby-Dick
, Chapter 32, Cetology

‘As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events.
The connections may be invisible
, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard,
but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface
.'

The Da Vinci Code
, Chapter 3

It was Friday and I was working from home. To my left lay an unread pile of paperwork. On my right was a half-started copy of
Moby-Dick
. And on the television screen in front of me was
Loose Women
, the loose British equivalent of
The View
. I believe it is important always to take a lunch break.

As usual on
Loose Women
– which I had seen before – it was Coleen Nolan who said what everyone was thinking. Perched in her usual berth next to the columnist Carol McGiffin, the former 80s pop princess and bestselling co-author of
Upfront & Personal: The Autobiography
was taking her turn in a discussion segment entitled ‘What Makes a Good Book?' Coleen, who according to previous debates sees nothing wrong with reasonable breast enhancement, does not think gay couples should be allowed to adopt, would rather her sons had sex with hookers in Amsterdam than ‘behind a club in Ibiza with absolutely no safeguards', and really likes chocolate, was speaking up for many of those present.

‘I can't stand all this snobbery about books! Ooh, that one was garbage, ooh it was trash! Ooh, la-di-dah! I mean, it's supposed to be good if we're reading, isn't it? I thought it was supposed to be good!'
¹

And the studio audience whistled and cheered and stamped its feet on Shakespeare's face, forever.

Which is not to say Coleen was wrong. There is an awful lot of snobbery around books. In the last ten years, much of it has been directed at one man. Has there ever been a more unpopular popular author than Dan Brown? For every satisfied customer of his sensational conspiracy thrillers, there is an offended Catholic, an exasperated academic or an infuriated subscriber to the
New York Review of Books
raging at his success and fame. For every Coleen Nolan, there is a Michiko Kakutani. Notorious
Middlemarch
-shirker Salman Rushdie has described
The Da Vinci Code
as ‘a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name'. None of which has prevented Dan Brown becoming one of the most widely read authors of modern times. Only E.L. James, author of
Fifty Shades of Grey
and its sequels, comes close.

On average, everyone has read
The Da Vinci Code
. You have probably read it. Even if you have not read it, statistically you have. My encounter with the phenomenon of Brown was pretty typical. I picked up on the book about a year after Alex was born. Sleep deprivation and kids' TV had turned my brain to Tubbycustard. All I wanted was something lightweight and undemanding.
The Da Vinci Code
was both of these. However, as I compulsively turned the pages to discover what incredible nonsense might happen to Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu next – incredible but gripping – I could not help noticing that the book was exceptionally poorly written. You go to a thriller for its thrills, not its poetry, but this was distractingly bad. My eye kept getting snagged on some clunking piece of expository dialogue or pseudo-scholarly statistic or shockingly ugly sentence. ‘
Da Vinci was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios
always
equal PHI
,' exclaimed Robert Langdon, wretchedly. And the movie was even worse.

I am not saying that Dan Brown cannot write. But whilst reading
The Da Vinci Code
, I was certainly thinking it.

However, although
The Da Vinci Code
did a whole heap of things defectively, it did one thing stupefyingly well – the plot. It was as though Brown had jettisoned all traces of style and credibility from his novel because he had realised, in a flash of Leonardo-like scientific insight, that style and credibility were the very properties preventing his theoretical story-balloon from taking flight. So they had been tossed over the side, along with beauty, truth and five hundred years of literary progress.

To be clear, Dan Brown knows how to tell a story – but there is more to telling a story than just telling the story. Stephen King understands this, as do Lee Child and Audrey Niffenegger. I am keen to make this point because naysayers of Dan Brown tend to be dismissed as either ‘ooh la-di-dah' snobs who disdain all escapist entertainment or jealous, sour rivals of a more successful author. ‘
All you haters can suck my chubby dick
,' types one web forum contributor calling himself Socrates. ‘
Hes got all the riches and the bitches! Does the envy hurt THAT bad? Boo hoo! Boo hoo hoo! Dan Brown's a really rich writer with millions of fans and I'm not! NO FAIR! Masturbate elsewhere, loserzzz. You people need to get lifes and go out and get laid
.'

Socrates, let me address your concerns. Liking bad books does not make you a bad person; equally nor does preferring good ones. Am I jealous of Dan Brown? I am not. I do not aspire to Dan's prose style nor do I wish to be a global figure of fun. Interestingly, although he is many, many times more successful than I am, until the publication of
The Da Vinci Code
, Dan and I sold similar quantities of books, after which he pulled ahead of me by a factor of approximately 40,000 to 1. Nonetheless, I wish him well – after all, we are all writers and we should stick together. (Are you listening, Salman?) As for the riches, of course I would love to earn just a fraction of Dan's wealth but that does not mean I want to do it his way. I would like Donald Trump's billions, without necessarily committing myself to his hairstyle.

Secondly, there is nothing wrong with escapism. I love escapism. As Brian Eno once observed, ‘We're all perfectly happy to accept the idea of going on holiday, nobody calls that escapism.' I frequently yearned to escape from my dull routine and a great book – of any stripe – offers us a cheap getaway from reality. But there are all sorts of holiday destinations and a multitude of ways to travel. We don't always have to end up behind a club in Ibiza with absolutely no safeguards.

Finally, Socrates, I question whether your dick is particularly chubby. Your confrontational manner suggests otherwise. In reality, I imagine your dick to be rather twiggy and bent, like a bent twig or a Twiglet. Perhaps it is you who should masturbate elsewhere, if you are able. (I wonder if you will ever read this, you who posted your thoughts on the Internet, never thinking they would be noted down and reproduced in a book, a copy of which will reside in the British Library for future generations to consult and snigger at you and your thin abnormal penis. What a surprise you'll have if you do!)

Memories of
The Da Vinci Code
's compelling plot had visited me often during my trawl through
Moby-Dick
, a book which might fairly be described as ‘putdownable'. It is widely hailed as ‘the great American novel' but as many a despairing high-school student will attest, it's no
Da Vinci Code
.
Moby-Dick
is long, gruelling, convoluted graft. And yet, as soon as I completed it, once I could hold it at arm's length and admire its intricacy and design, I knew
Moby-Dick
was obviously, uncannily, a masterwork. It wormed into my subconscious; I dreamed about it for nights afterwards. Whereas when I finished
The Da Vinci Code
, which had taken little less than twelve hours from cover to cover, I chucked it aside and thought: wow – I really ought to read something
good
.

Moby-Dick
is a work of genius and some of its genius seemed dark or supernatural. It most reminded me of Coppola's
Apocalypse Now
or Sly Stone's
There's a Riot Goin' On
, both products of isolation and psychosis, and both somewhat out of the control of their ostensible creators. Or perhaps that is a definition of genius, a force that cannot help but beget itself, regardless of the toll it takes on the artist; in all three cases, these men struggled to locate such ungodly inspiration in their later work. Melville knew he had birthed, in his words, ‘
a wicked book
'. In a letter to a female neighbour, he wrote: ‘
Dont you buy it – dont you read it . . . A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it
.'
Moby-Dick
is a miscreated, mystical leviathan, often unfathomably deep, whose flaws and imperfections miraculously become the contours of the immaculate whole.

It also begs interpretation. The whiteness of the whale, its supernatural blankness, has been made to stand for society's preoccupations in any given era from the early twentieth century on – sexual, political, spiritual, military, cosmic, personal. (‘Call me Ishmael.' ‘No, call
me
Ishmael.') The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end – a cliché but physically what happened – as I read of ‘
the damp, drizzly November
' in Ishmael's soul, compelling him to flee the ‘
thousands of mortal men . . . tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks
'. Here was I, undertaking my own voyage of discovery, adrift on the sea of books: ‘
Who ain't a slave? Tell me that
.' I preferred not to think too hard about who or what my white whale might be. But at the same time,
Moby-Dick
is mesmerisingly, eternally interpretable, so much so that Melville reminds us early on that, whoever we are and whatever our discipline, we are always reading ‘. . .
that story of
Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
'

However, we should not overlook the fact that, for fifty years, few readers saw their reflection in
Moby-Dick
or hailed it as a ‘great book'. It took a new century, a World War and the innovations of modernism before the critical establishment was willing or even able to comprehend it; readers only began to come aboard in appreciable numbers after World War II. In contrast with Melville's early seafarer yarns
Typee
and
Omoo
, which had attracted enthusiastic reviews and healthy sales, the publication of
Moby-Dick
in 1851 was, in the words of Robert McCrum, ‘
a horrible combination of a botch and a flop
'. Total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher Harper & Brothers; forty years later, it had still not sold out its first edition of 3000 copies. Following the poisonous reaction to his next, even weirder, novel
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
and the rejection of
Isle of the Cross
(now lost) in 1854, Melville wrote very little. He lectured; he tried his hand at poetry; he drifted. Eventually, his wife and her relatives used their influence to secure him a post at the New York City customs house where for the next twenty years he worked as an inspector, ‘
a humble but adequately paying appointment
'. There were whispers of insanity, heavy drinking and violence; one of his sons shot himself, another ran away from home and was never heard from again. When Melville died in 1891, he and his Leviathan were more or less forgotten.

In the 1990s, there used to be a website called Grudge Match™ which staged imaginary fights between characters from pop culture. These ranged from the obvious (‘Obi-Wan Kenobi vs. Darth Vader') to the witty (‘Red-Shirted Ensigns vs. Imperial Stormtroopers') to the cross-platform meta-brawl (‘John McClane vs. The Death Star'). Some grudge matches even had nothing to do with
Star Wars
– ‘a Rottweiler vs. a Rottweiler's weight in Chihuahuas', for example, or the epic ‘Battle of the Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath vs. Greed vs. Lust vs. Gluttony vs. Sloth vs. Envy vs. Pride vs. Virtue'. The outcomes were hotly debated by contributors from all over the planet and, following a public vote, a winner would be declared, in the above cases Obi-Wan, Stormtroopers, John McClane, the Rottweiler and Lust respectively. But after ten years, the site's owners packed it in because ‘long story short: we ain't in grad school any more'. (However, matches have been archived at www.grudge-match.com/History/index.html – kids, this and pornography are how your parents first harnessed the awesome power of the Internet.)

When contemplating the difference between
Moby-Dick
and
The Da Vinci Code
, it would be tempting to frame it in Grudge Match™ terms, thus:

Figs. 6: Whale vs. Grail.

(courtesy Gabriel Barathieu)