The Da Vinci Code, and other fictions

• Dan Brown.
  The Da Vinci Code.
  London, 2004, Corgi (first paperback edition).
  0552149519.
• Umberto Eco.
  Foucault's Pendulum.
  London, 1990, Picador (paperback English translation).
  0330314971
• Riane Eisler.
  The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future.
  San Francisco, 1988, Harper.
  0062502891.

(This one was a comment to a blog entry by Jim Putnam; but also a response to Dirk Dusharme, on whose recommendation I read The Da Vinci Code.)

I was born nominally Roman Catholic, am long lapsed into effective atheism, but have a nun for an aunt so remain interested at one remove. In my younger days, I did quite a lot of second hand dilettante poking into the history with which both The Chalice and the Blade and The Da Vinci Code deal in their different ways. It's also built upon (far more interestingly, in my opinion) in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum - which I thoroughly recommend as another fiction to balance that of Dan Brown. Nicea fascinated me as a child - every Catholic child, especially one with a nun in the family, knows the story of Nicea, and how the original plethora of texts was whittled down to the old and new testaments, about the Manichean and Albigensian heresies, and so on. I also spent my degree years in Isra'el, and worked as a tour guide, so became superficially familiar the story around the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And I recently, about two weeks ago, read The Da Vinci Code on a friend's recommendation.

The important thing to hold onto is that all such history (all history, in fact - but particularly the history of a traditions which have been largely erased by the success of others) is fragmentary in the extreme. There are many indisputable pieces, but none of them join up - rather as if a thousand jigsaw puzzles of similar scenes, all on the same type of card, each of a thousand pieces, were shaken up together ... then most of the result thrown away, leaving only a hundred random pieces out of the original million. And those hundred pieces have over time been scuffed, damaged, soaked and dried, lost their distinctively shaped lobes to leave only approximate squares and circles of blurred image particles. Many putative pictures can be hypothesised from these pieces; which of them (if any) is closest to the original scene or set of scenes (we don't, any longer, have any record even of how many jigsaws there were to start with) will always be a matter for argument and debate on balance of tenuous probability.

Any historian can only ever put together hypotheses; historians attempting to reassemble surviving jigsaw fragments of the pre-Christian matriarchal religions even more so; and the chains of deduction linking them across the dark ages to the renaissance are tenuous in the extreme.

The Chalice and the Blade is not bad history because it is unprovable and because it is one interpretation no more certain than a myriad others; it is an interesting and perfectly valid assembly of known facts and plausible postulates in one possible way. It is, however, dubious scholarship because it does not acknowledge its own necessarily provisional and hypothetical nature.

The Da Vinci Code doesn't pretend to be history; it is a fiction; so no such criticisms can be aimed at it. The author is openly presenting a fiction; it is the reader who can make the mistake of taking it for history. In fact, it is at least two distinct fictions: a historioreligious one and a sociopolitical one.

Starting with the historioreligious fiction, for now. As a very rough estimate (I don't claim to have put even a modicum of care into verifying my numbers), Brown has taken about 10% actual original jigsaw pieces as the basis for his fiction. To string them together, he has then selected eclectically from the many and various hypotheses (historical, conspiracy theoretical, mythical) those bits which, assembled creatively, make up another 50% of his framework. And finally, as is perfectly legitimate in a fiction, he has made the remaining 40% up - it is simply false in any academic sense external to the fiction.

The other, sociopolitical fiction is of course the wholly created modern world within which the action is set. This is Europe which bears as much relation to the actual Europe in our world as the German/Japanese ruled America of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Tower to the real USA. It has been deliberately constructed to echo the puzzles, conspiracies, uncertainties, mysteries, arrogances, dominations and betrayals of the historioreligious fiction. This Europe is a curious blend of the USA and the USSR, with law enforcement structures similarly blended from FBI and KGB. This Europe is openly and candidly divorced from the "real" Europe of the present day - but has clearly signposted parallels to the mediaeval Europe in which the roots of the story are drawn. The "alternative history" form of this sociopolitical fiction is a clear pointer to how the historioreligious one is viewed by the author: as raw material for creativity, not as history.