There are some things that you do that you know are questionable, but you do them all the same. Because sometimes you simply want to fall, or should that be Fall? We are, after all, only human.
Perhaps I am making too much of my current weakness, but I do feel that it is a guilty pleasure.
The source of my self-indulgent unease is a book. Not a book that I have bought (for once) but I book that I have been loaned. It is a substantial book, with a rather fine cover featuring an overview of the city of Barcelona with the instantly recognizable structure of La Sagrada Familia taking centre stage. though in my reading so far, the action has taken place in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
The title of the book is Origin, and the author is Dan Brown, he of The Da Vinci Code, and it is Book 5 in the series featuring his academic enigma solving professor Robert Langdon. And should I be reading it?
The fact that I am even asking myself the question is significant. Why shouldn’t I read something that has sold, with his other books, over 200 million copies? Or is it because he has sold over 200 million copies that I should shun his work as being far too popular for my fastidious taste?
There is a sort of snobbery over best-sellers that posits that if the appeal is so wide-ranging then it must perforce be somewhat infra dig to be seen paddling in such muddy overcrowded waters!
One of my favourite quotations is taken from Len Deighton’s Billion Dollar Brain and concerns someone sneering at another character whom he accuses of talking in clichés, the response from the accused is, “I got nothing against clichés, son. It’s the quickest method of communication yet invented, but I get you.” Which nicely puts the supposed superiority of the sneerer in place, and yet at the same time recognizes that while the efficiency of the communication via cliché might be unparalleled, there is an element of style that is lacking.
I have only just started reading Origin and I am already hooked. Yes, I can see that the structure of the novel is formulaic and yes Brown is serving up all the old tropes from religion, secrets, codes and mystery that has served him well, not well, most handsomely in his previous books, but if you are wheeling out Robert Langdon (again) then you just about know what to expect in terms of subject matter (just as you do with James Bond) but the delight is finding out how the old tune has been jazzed up to keep you reading.
Brown is a safe pair of narrative hands, and the action fairly bounces along. I am not expecting to find the equivalent of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann in his pages, but I am expecting to be intrigued. It also helps that the locations in Spain that he has chosen for the action so far are all ones that I have visited, and therefore feel a personal link with them.
And, anyway, I should point out that I am a person who has read ALL the space adventure Lucky Starr novels written by Isaac Asimov under a different name (Paul French) purely for money. They are awful, and I devoured them. To be fair, these novels were written for a juvenile audience, and there was a hope that the series would be picked up by a television company and produced, but they never were. To give a flavour of the book, I could cite just one of the snappy titles, Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, and the writing matches the banality of the title. And remember, I’ve read it, and the rest of them.
I justified to myself the reading of the Lucky Starr series because I was on a sort of project to read all the sci-fi stories and novels that Asimov had ever written, so I had to read the Lucky Starr novels to achieve completion. Did they have the profundity of Nightfall or The Foundation Trilogy? No, of course they didn’t, but they were not attempting to match those. And I enjoyed them. All of them.
Brown was quoted as saying of The da Vinci Code that he hoped it would be “an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate” and from what I have read in Origin so far, he could claim with some justification that same statement as a tag line for the novel.
And what, after all, is wrong with “an entertaining story” at any time!
