Dan Brown's thriller 'The Da Vinci Code' has captured the imagination of readers to become the best selling book of the year. It's not hard to work out why, writes Jonathan Freedland
You will count them on the beaches. You will spot them at the airports, in their thousands and tens of thousands. You may even succumb to them yourself.
They are copies of the Da Vinci Code, proliferating at a rate unheard of even in the telephone-number world of mass-market publishing. The 600-page thriller is breaking records at breakneck speed. This week it will become the best-selling book in Britain, with a total well past the half-million mark - after less than four months in the shops. Around the world it has sold in excess of 10m, nearly 8m of those in hard covers, making it the best-selling hardback novel ever.
It's even having an impact on the tourist trade, beyond its role as the holiday read for the summer of 2004. The Louvre along with London's Temple Church and the Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh are all reporting surges in visitor numbers, as Da Vinci pilgrims retrace the novel's journey. The Rosslyn Chapel, where the story reaches its climax, has seen foot traffic increase by 56% since last year.
Why is this book such a smash? Superficially it looks no different from the rest of the fat tomes, their authors' names in embossed lettering, that constitute the thriller market. We have a protagonist sleuth who, author Dan Brown unabashedly tells us, looks like Harrison Ford, is wanted for murder and is on the run - accompanied by a comely female cop, the brilliant young French code-breaker, Sophie Neveu.
So far, so familiar. Except Brown's heroes do not rely on laser-guided missiles or Mission Impossible computer wizardry. Their weapons are their brains. In what can read like a glorified treasure hunt, the pair have to decipher a series of clues, riddles and anagrams - some of them contained in Leonardo's most famous paintings - to discover the secret they crave.
This secret is the key Da Vinci difference. For the central puzzle is none other than the Holy Grail itself. En route, the author sets out an alternative history of Christianity, arguing that the church has maintained a 2,000-year conspiracy to falsify the true story of Jesus - concealing his marriage to Mary Magdalene, the child they had together and the survival of a holy bloodline to this very day. In long chunks of not always plausible dialogue, we learn of a Romanised church bent on demonising Mary Magdalene as a whore in order to suppress the pagan tradition of goddess worship, the belief that femininity was close to divinity - and, ultimately, to suppress women themselves.
The church has hit back, of course, backing some of the dozen or so volumes of rebuttal the thriller has spawned: Cracking the Da Vinci Code; Breaking the Da Vinci Code; the Da Vinci Code Decoded; and the rest. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has condemned the book as "a work of bizarre religious imaginings" based on "a facade of scholarship" that exploits "gullibility for conspiracy". Anxious clerics have taken the message to standing-room-only meetings from Miami to Seattle, seeking to reassure the many Christians who admit their faith has been shaken by the Da Vinci Code and what it presents as historically grounded truths. The main effect has been predictable: more publicity and even more sales.
There are conventional, publishing-industry explanations for this success. The book does what thrillers are meant to do, hooking you early and keeping you there. The writing may be basic to leaden, the characterisation slim to non-existent, but this is an author who knows how to do suspense. Every one of the 105 short chapters ends on a cliffhanger: the bedside clock may say 3am, but you can't help yourself. As Brown would put it: Just one more chapter.
The riddle-solving offers another pleasure, the same quiet satisfaction derived from reading the solution to the previous day's crossword: a-ha, so that's what it meant! As for the art history and smatterings of church arcana, publishing insiders say this works a treat with readers, flattering them into feeling smart and rewarding them with the sense that they have learned something.
Still, I suspect the triumph of the Code tells a larger story. First, it confirms that people are prepared to believe the worst of the church - even in America, the most "churched" society in the world. That millions of Americans are ready to accept the notion of a murderous Catholic monk taking orders from a corrupt bishop should sound the alarm in Catholicism's upper reaches. In the US this has been seized on as confirmation that the scandal of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has sent public esteem for the church plummeting, to the extent that Rome's servants are now acceptable as mass-market villains. The anti-clericalism of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy showed the extent to which Britain remains a secular society. But this is a surprising discovery to make about the US.
Catholic intellectuals are more troubled by the credulousness of those Christians who admit the book has challenged their beliefs. What does that say about the quality of church education? Amy Welborn, author of Decoding Da Vinci, says: "Most churches have done a terrible job in the last 40 years of teaching people the basics of the faith." This readiness to believe in conspiracies goes beyond the church, of course. Deep scepticism of authority, a staple of the thriller genre, is now an ingrained feature of the US landscape. It always had deep roots, but the Vietnam and Watergate experiences entrenched it. Who knows, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq might have dug that cynicism in a little further still. The result is that Americans apparently have no trouble believing that those in charge might have lied and lied, even for millennia. Like Michael Moore's runaway hit Fahrenheit 9/11, the Da Vinci Code insists on an intense distrust of authority.
Perhaps the novel has struck a chord with women especially, not only through its elevated talk of the "sacred feminine", but also its suggestion of a deliberate, centuries-old plan to hold women back. Maybe it appeals to the common urge to find a grand, sweeping theory of everything that takes our confusing world and divines a pattern out of the chaos.
Or perhaps there is a simpler yearning this book meets; the same desire nurtured by Pullman and the Harry Potter series, both of which found large adult audiences, and the forthcoming sorcerers' tale, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which hopes to do the same. It is that even grown-ups want to believe in magic.
The 21st century may be replete with technology that can do everything and science that can explain everything, but human beings seem to crave the mysterious and miraculous, the forever out-of-reach. The Lord of the Rings trilogy broke box-office records, just as Spider-Man 2 is doing now, and not solely by drawing in teenage boys. Adults want to escape too. The world of 2004 is a fearful place. Is it any wonder we yearn to soar away - as if by magic?