The Da Vinci code

"The Da Vinci Code" would not be the subject

of this column had it not sold 60.5 million
copies, according to its publisher Doubleday.
Of course this does not make it the best-selling
book of all time. That title, as irony would have
it, goes to the Bible, half of which one of Dan
Brown's characters dismisses as "false."

Like the Bible but unlike Mr. Brown's novel,

most of the books in the sales Pantheon have
had utilitarian staying power--McGuffey's
Reader, the Guinness Book of Records, Noah
Webster's "The American Spelling Book," Dr.
Spock's baby book and the World Almanac.
Now comes "The Da Vinci Code," selling twice
as many copies as the 30 million attributed to
Jacqueline Susann's "The Valley of the Dolls."

"The Valley of the Dolls" was about people

having sex. "The Da Vinci Code" is about Jesus
leaving Mary Magdalene pregnant with his baby while he dies on the cross.
So in a sense, Mr. Brown's novel respects tradition.

Still, it boggles the mind, and the struggling soul, that "The Da Vinci Code"
has sold 60.5 million copies in 45 languages. Sales in the U.S. are 21.7
million, in the U.K. nine million, more than 4.7 million each in France and
Japan, 3.6 million in Germany, 1.2 million in China and, no surprise, 143,000
in Romania.

A righteous army has formed to prove everything Dan Brown says about the
early Christian church is false, which it most certainly is. Mr. Brown's history
pales against the real story of Christianity's first centuries. I recommend two
gems: Henry Chadwick's "The Early Church" (Penguin) and Peter Brown's
"The Rise of Western Christendom" (Blackwell). Grand, thrilling drama.

But markets don't lie. Clearly Mr. Brown knows something that is true. What is
it?

To answer the mystery of Dan Brown's unholy tale, I visited the church-like
quiet of Barnes & Noble on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue and asked an attendant
where the book was. He arched his brow--as Mr. Brown's characters tend to
do every few paragraphs--and whispered, "The Da Vinci table is over there."
The table held many treasures. I discovered the polymathic physician Sherwin
B. Nuland's "Leonardo da Vinci," a delightful Penguin biography that has
nothing to do with Mr. Brown's book. Checking that no one who knew me was
nearby, I opened "The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus"
because its cover promised an "Interpretation" by the eminent English
professor Harold Bloom, a sometime contributor to this page, who remarks
that the book's first Saying "is not by Jesus but by his twin."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, preparing for today's opening of

Tom Hanks and Ron Howard's apparently awful movie, has created a "Da
Vinci Code" Web site addressing such issues as "The Witch Killing Frenzies."
A spokesman for the bishops, in a nice touch of self-confident
understatement, said the bishops would be concerned "if only one person"
came away from "The Da Vinci Code" confused about the church. OK, maybe
three or four did.

During my own long, hard slog through "The Da Vinci Code" lectures on the
sacred feminine and the pagan roots of iambic pentameter, I most appreciated
how Dan Brown, his own authorial eyebrow raised, slyly slips in a wink-wink
sentence lest people think he really is nuts.

Chapter 40: "Everyone loves a conspiracy." (Italics, needless to say, Mr.

Brown's.)

Chapter 48: "It was all interconnected."

Chapter 55, after Prof. Teabing's arcane summary of eighty gospels (Mr.
Brown's italic): "Sophie's head was spinning. 'And all of this relates to the Holy
Grail?'" My thoughts exactly, Sophie.

But the final clue to the hoax arrives in Chapter 60: "Langdon held up his
Mickey Mouse watch and told her that Walt Disney had made it his quiet life's
work to pass on the Grail story to future generations." I'll bet that line isn't in
the movie.

Here's my theory of "The Da Vinci Code." Dan Brown was sitting one night at
the monthly meeting of his local secret society, listening to a lecture on the
65th gospel, and he got to thinking: "I wonder if there's any limit to what
people are willing to believe these days about a conspiracy theory. Let's say I
wrote a book that said Jesus was married. To Mary Magdalene. Who was
pregnant at the Crucifixion. And she is the Holy Grail. Jesus wanted her to run
the church as a global sex society called Heiros Gamos, but Peter elbowed
her out of the job. Her daughter was the beginning of the Merovingian dynasty
of France. Jesus' family is still alive. There were 80 gospels, not four.
Leonardo DiCaprio, I mean da Vinci, knew all this. The 'Mona Lisa' is
Leonardo's painting of himself in drag. Da Vinci's secret was kept alive by
future members of 'the brotherhood,' including Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy
and Victor Hugo. The Catholic Church is covering all this up."
Then Dan Brown said softly, "Would anyone buy into a plot so preposterous
and fantastic?" Then he started writing.

The real accomplishment of "The Da Vinci Code" is that Dan Brown has
proven that the theory of conspiracy theories is totally elastic, it has no limits.
The genre's future is limitless, with the following obvious plots:

Bill Clinton is directly descended from Henry VIII; Hillary is his third cousin.
Jack Ruby was Ronald Reagan's half-brother. Dick Cheney has been dead for
five years; the vice president is a clone created by Halliburton in 1998. The
Laffer Curve is the secret sign of the Carlyle Group. Michael Moore is the
founder of the Carlyle Group, which started World War I. The New York Times
is secretly run by the Rosicrucians (this is revealed on the first page of
Chapter 47 of "The Da Vinci Code" if you look at the 23rd line through a
kaleidoscope). Jacques Chirac is descended from Judas.

None of this strikes me as the least bit implausible, especially the latter. I'd
better get started.