The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (13 page)

Grail
(© PoodlesRock/Corbis)

It is the eternal dilemma for the artist and the hack alike: fame and wealth in the here and now or an impoverished, miserable life but a posthumous shot at immortality – ‘Austerity vs. Posterity', or ‘Riches 'n' Bitches vs. Nervous Twitches 'n' Diggin' Ditches'. The fact was this. More people had probably read – and enjoyed –
The Da Vinci Code
in five years than had read – and enjoyed –
Moby-Dick
in one hundred and fifty. The latter was awkward, demanding and brilliant. The former was accessible, electrifying and bollocks. In the white corner, high art. In the Brown corner, low schlock.

And yet, a Grudge Match™ between
Moby-Dick
and
The Da Vinci Code
, though amusing, would do little except confirm our prejudices and tell us next to nothing about what makes each novel so remarkable in its own sphere. So instead I suggest we look for the hidden – and not-so-hidden – resemblances between the lives and careers of Herman Melville and Dan Brown. What do they have in common? We may be astonished by what we uncover.

I call . . . a Love Match!

TEN ASTOUNDING SIMILARITIES BETWEEN

THE DA VINCI CODE
BY DAN BROWN

AND
MOBY-DICK
BY HERMAN MELVILLE

Dan Brown
(© Featureflash/Shutterstock)

♥

Herman Melville
(© Bettmann/Corbis)

1. QUESTS FOR THE HOLY GRAIL

The Da Vinci Code
and
Moby-Dick
are both epic grail quests, over a hundred chapters in length, each with a scene-setting
prologue and meditative epilogue. Both narratives focus on the personal quest of an individual, or individuals, who, by going against the received wisdom of their age and confronting terrible, unknown dangers, put their sanity, their lives and even their immortal souls in peril. In
Moby-Dick
, Ahab, Ishmael and the
Pequod
crew criss-cross the planet in bloody pursuit of a seldom-glimpsed killer albino whale whose metaphorical significance is practically infinite; in
The Da Vinci Code
, Robert Langdon, Sir Leigh Teabing, Interpol, Opus Dei and a seldom-glimpsed killer albino monk – metaphorical significance: nil – criss-cross the planet in bloody pursuit of the actual Holy Grail: a cup, or a code, or a cryptex, or a person, or a cup again at the end, I wasn't quite sure. But then I wasn't sure what was going on in
Moby-Dick
a lot of the time either.

2. FACTS

Melville and Brown both love statistics, historical anecdote and facts. The very first word of
The Da Vinci Code
is ‘Fact', a statement of intent which is only undermined by the fact that so much of what follows is untrue.
²
Brown initially claimed that either ‘99 per cent' or ‘absolutely all of [the book] is true', although he has subsequently retrenched, utilising phrases like ‘alleged', ‘rumoured', and ‘seem to be' when discussing this controversial issue. Nevertheless, his novel is full of art history, theological supposition and precise measurements of height, depth and length, sometimes to the nearest millimetre.
Moby-Dick
, meanwhile, creaks with ancient maritime lore, accurate scientific data (accurate for its time) and disquisitions on the function and harvesting of blubber, spermaceti, etc. As a young man, Melville had shipped with the whaler
Acushnet
and the purpose of his novel was, in part, to impart that hard-won knowledge to the reading public. ‘
I mean to give the truth of the thing
,' he wrote. However . . .

3. THE FACT FACTOR

Melville and Brown both wear their learning heavily. Brown will merrily disfigure a sentence if it means he can cram in one more gratuitous statistic, e.g. ‘
Murray Hill Place – the new Opus Dei World Headquarters and conference centre – is located at 243 Lexington Avenue in New York City. With a price tag of just over $47 million, the 133,000-square-foot tower is clad in red brick and Indiana limestone. Designed by May & Pinska, the building contains over one hundred bedrooms, six dining rooms –
' Enough already!

If a little learning is a dangerous thing, a lot of learning can be even worse.
Moby-Dick
repeatedly judders to a chapter-length halt so Melville/Ishmael can instruct the reader on the measurement of a whale's skeleton, or harpooning technique, or the best cuts of whale meat: tongue, hump, barbecued balls of porpoise (‘
the old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them
'). The author is also an incorrigible show-off. He throws in Milton, Byron, Shakespeare; pagan folklore, magazine clippings, Holy Scripture; Cleopatra, Cinderella, Thomas Jefferson and dozens more. He probably has something to say about pots calling kettles black too but I am not at home at present and do not have a copy of
Moby-Dick
to hand, so am unable to confirm. There is no Internet access at the cottage where I am currently staying. I'll get back to you.

4. DIALOGUE

Neither Brown nor Melville cares for naturalistic dialogue. As you will have noted, no one in real life speaks like either Robert ‘
I've got to get to a library . . . fast!
' Langdon or Captain ‘
lick the sky!
' Ahab. And why should they? This is not real life. Nevertheless, it represents a problem for cinema and theatre adaptations of both
The Da Vinci Code
and
Moby-Dick
, which can seem slightly, well, ludicrous. Of these, the flop musical theatre adaptation of Melville's novel –
Moby! A Whale of a Tale
– was perhaps more in sympathy with the original text than other, more serious efforts. I should know: I still have the souvenir mug.

The principles of brand extension make it inevitable that there will be a musical theatre adaptation of
The Da Vinci Code
. Potential producers should be aware that the book and lyrics of
Moby!
were penned by one
Robert Longden
. Coincidence? Professor Robert Langdon would tell us there is no such thing.

5. SYMBOLOGY

In their different ways, Brown and Melville are both obsessed with symbols and symbolism. Robert Langdon is a professor of symbology at Harvard.
The Da Vinci Code
is packed with cryptic riddles;
Moby-Dick
is a cryptic riddle in itself. And what is that elusive white whale if not a ‘lost symbol'? Dan Brown particularly loves anagrams and his characters are always obliged to untangle not-very-fiendish word puzzles to reveal hidden meanings and clues. This is the sort of lexicographical riddling one associates with writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, only not as good.

Let us adopt a symbologist approach to our subjects and see whether there are any invisible connections buried just beneath the surface. One anagram of ‘Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
' would be ‘Hmm – a credible milky novel'. Shuffle the letters of ‘Dan Brown's
The Da Vinci Code
' and we uncover this message: ‘B. was a contrived, hidden con.' And rearranging ‘Andy Miller –
The Year of Reading Dangerously
' proves what we have suspected for a while: ‘I am only a greying fatheaded Surrey nerd – LOL.'

Dr Langdon may be onto something.

6. DAY JOBS

Because they need to feed and clothe themselves, many published authors have day jobs before, during and after their literary careers; Herman Melville was no exception. Prior to becoming a novelist, he was a sailor; while he was a novelist, he was also a lecturer and a journalist; and, as noted above, after the failure of
Moby-Dick
and
Pierre
, he became a customs official. Disturbingly, both he and Dan Brown also found paid work as English teachers. ‘I didn't understand how funny this play
Much Ado About Nothing
truly was until I had to teach it,' Brown has said. ‘There is no wittier dialogue anywhere.' It is a mark of Brown's commercial clout that an edition of
Much Ado About Nothing
was recently published with this quote stamped on the front cover – someone at the publishers clearly felt Shakespeare could do with the leg-up.

Before becoming a bestselling author, Brown hung around in Hollywood, teaching English and trying to make it as a singer-songwriter. He formed his own record company and self-released several unsuccessful albums. In 1993,
Dan Brown
contained a song entitled ‘976-LOVE' which, possibly catching a wave from Nicholson Baker's 1992 novel
Vox
, appears to be about phone sex. ‘
Now when I'm feeling small, you're the one that I call
,' sings Brown, with rudimentary symbolism. ‘
I see your face in my mind / I feel your love come pulsin' through my telephone line –
'

Ugh! Hang up, hang up!

As far as we know, Herman Melville never wrote a song about phone sex. But a glance at Chapter 94 of
Moby-Dick
, ‘A Squeeze of the Hand', furnishes us with a hint of what a song it might have been. ‘
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; / I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it . . . / nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other . . . / Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever
!' From which we conclude that, unlike Dan Brown, Herman Melville could have made a serious fist of it in LA.

7. CRITICS

As discussed, as Dan Brown's fortune has spiralled, so has the opprobrium of critics. The Catholic Church denounces him as a heretic; professors of literature lambast him; celebrities like Stephen Fry dismiss his books as ‘arse gravy of the worst kind'.
³
He has to put up with spiteful parodies, online polls of his twenty worst sentences and a man with a Fatwa on his head calling him names. Brown tries to be sanguine. ‘There are some people who understand what I do, and they sort of get on the train and go for a ride and have a great time,' he said on publication of
The Lost Symbol
, ‘and there are other people who should probably just read somebody else.'

But if anything, Brown should count himself lucky. With sales of his books already dwindling, critics attacked Herman Melville with such venom that they effectively put him out of business. The bafflement which greeted
Moby-Dick
turned to outrage when
Pierre
appeared. On 8 September 1852, the
New York Day Book
ran a news story under the headline: ‘HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY'. The paper's correspondent reported that ‘
a critical friend, who read Melville's last book,
“Ambiguities” (sic.) . . . told us that it appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman
.' He continues: ‘
We were somewhat startled at the remark, but still more at learning, a few days after, that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink
.' With press and public deserting him, Melville's publishers soon followed suit. Which is ironic, because . . .

8. BLOODY PUBLISHERS

Both Brown and Melville have good reason to blame their editors and publishers for at least some of the negative feeling directed towards them.
Moby-Dick
was first published in London by Richard Bentley, who made numerous cuts to the manuscript and forgot to include the book's epilogue, leading many already discombobulated critics to conclude that Ishmael had drowned with the rest of the
Pequod
's crew, and was therefore unavailable to narrate the novel they had just read, an error for which they entirely blamed Melville and not his incompetent publisher.

Likewise, many of the factual and grammatical errors with which
The Da Vinci Code
is littered arguably could and should have been picked up before publication. As one of our friend Socrates' fellow correspondents notes, ‘
No self-respecting editor could have missed such blunders. Editors' jobs are to make the author look better (and more educated) than they are
.' Apparently, something went wrong with
The Da Vinci Code
. Or maybe it didn't. Perhaps no one ever thought Brown's mass-market thriller would come under such close, rigorous, critical scrutiny. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a reasonable expectation because, under normal circumstances, such a page-turner might be read exclusively by the audience Brown was writing for, readers who want to ‘get on the train and go for a ride and have a great time'. True, someone could have gone over the train with a squeegee prior to departure – an editor, or Brown himself for that matter – but ultimately it has made no difference to the passengers. To stretch the metaphor to breaking point, Dan Brown's high-speed bullet trains run on farts but they get millions where they want to go. On Herman Melville's scenic, if slow, stopping service, meanwhile, there will always be seats available. But no thanks to the rail operator.