The Inferno of Dan Brown and his Code

Those of us who have read The Da Vinci Code - which is a fair few of us judging by the sales figures - can be split easily and neatly into two groups. There are those who picked it up and absorbed the story by osmosis over the period of a couple of days because that's what they always do when a new thriller comes out and there are those who read it once the hype had begun and then felt compelled to comment. If I can navigate my thoughts, this is an article about stories and what lies at their heart. Then again, it's very possible that I might get sidetracked by all manner of rubbish.

In all my years as a reader on the planet, I have either had cause or been made to read the following classics: The Return of the Native, Oliver Twist and Little Women. I consider myself lucky that the list stopped there, but I also think I speak for many when I make the sweeping statement that they are all exceptionally tedious. I didn't enjoy reading them one iota. Conversely, around the same time, I chose to read both Carrie and The Shining. As far as some are concerned, Stephen King is the ultimate in low brow literature experiences, but based on the premise that millions of readers the world over choose to invest their time and money in him, how does that make it low brow?  He has a good command of the English language. His stories are about people we care about or can at least identify with on some level and there's always more than a fair share of surprises along the way. All of which really goes to prove nothing except that Stephen King knows how to tell a story. Put back to back with Hardy's Return of the Native - which tells a 60 second story in a very long winded fashion - I'd say that was OK.

In a nutshell, King appeals to the primeval part of us. The part of the soul that's still gathered around a campfire listening to tales from the forest. 'Classic' authors however - I don't get, at least in the way that they have come to be defined. It's the literary equivalent of listening to a couple of very elderly neighbours talking over the garden fence about the way things used to be - about people you've never heard of and have even less desire to know them. At an educated guess, I think this is not because they are awful writers but because they're not dealing with 'my time'. We can't be interested in every era throughout history. Can we?

I can take a certain amount of snobbery when it comes to music and sports, but not books. The DaVinci Code is an outstanding example of the literary snob. Dan Brown never set out to change the world. It's well publicised that the concept itself wasn't new but really, all anybody needed to do was read Angels & Demons to know it was nothing more than the next book in the sequence. Having said that, he might have made an absolute fortune but when the pressure was on to deliver the next, that didn't shape up quite so well. It might have sold in its millions, but did anybody recommend The Lost Symbol to their friends in the same amounts? I don't think so. I suspect Inferno will be much better now that expectation has come back down to a reasonable level.

I've always been a sucker for a for a great story and what we need to remember is that we've been born into an era outside of the classics. There are many writers out there who, almost on a weekly basis, are stating in print that most writers today have a weak command of language. Whilst I tend to agree with that, it doesn't mean they have a weak grasp on how to spin a yarn. Thus, the ultimate goal for us all, is to decide whether we love stories or literature. We can of course love them both, but the clash comes when the literary critic gets a hold of a blockbuster. These people should be careful what they say because despite the ever advancing digital book world, it's sales from authors like Harlan Coben that are single handedly keeping every single branch of high street bookstores open.

See, it strikes me that the business of publishing and book selling are supported by authors who tell stories that people want to read - and while it's nice to think of a starving author as being noble, that pretty much sucks all round for all concerned. Coming in at it from the other angle, neither do I mind if it takes fools buying 'a Kardashian' (a phrase I am now introducing to the English language to depict lower than low-brow) if it means the kickback means another Andrew Kaufman book finds a home.

My first brush with the high brow versus low brow argument came very young as I moved through The Famous Five, Secret Seven, Five Find Outers and umm, "the ones who had no collective name for their gang but one of them called Jack also had a parrot called Dinah" - I think. (Edit: having done some research on that to refresh my memory, Dinah was actually Jack's sister. His parrot was called Kiki. They appear to be called 'The Adventure Series', but I think that's been added post-watershed as I would have been shit out of luck if I'd gone into a store and asked for them by that name. Do not confuse this series with the Five Find Outers who sported the inimitable Fatty and a small dog called Buster. Fatty was my favourite childhood detective because he taught me how to get out of a locked room - so long as the key was left in the door on the other side. I tried it many times and it worked a treat. Not that I used to get myself locked in the cellar as a kid but still, the skill was there if I needed it).

Later, and very swiftly, I moved onto The Hardy Boys, Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators and Willard Price's 'Adventure Series' - which I believe really were called 'The Adventure Series'. The Willard Price series featured Hal and Roger Hunt who were teenage zoologists, which written down sounds like the dullest piece of crap ever created but no - it opened a world of amazingness up to me. A world that up until that moment was quantum locked into nameless British villages and distant relatives that made pies on a Sunday.

As a slight aside - here's some covers I found online that are from the Five Find Outers run being published (I was a Red Dragon reader and proud of it) when I was a kid:

and a selection of the sort of illustrations that were inside:

 

 Now take a look at how they eventually got upgraded at some point in the nineties to include shit such as this:

Seriously? Is that really a man who is somewhat short in the height department pulling a smoke from a packet? Is that supposed to show kids how smoking stunts your growth? Sadly, I think it is.

See. Sidetracked. I've totally forgotten what the point was now... oh yeah - highbrow...

It's not that I wasn't exposed to high culture when I was a kid. Far from it but there was a sensible mix which meant choice. The Water Babies is an incredible book and Kingsley should be mentioned in the same breath as people like Dickens more often. We also had Welsh kids books, the mighty Mabinogion and for some reason, a book of Danish folk tales that had been translated into English that was intriguing to say the least. I had my own comics delivered too. So to paint a very miniature picture of twenty years of history, there was always more than enough to read. Everybody had their own books and nothing was off limits. Not even Lyn Marshall's yoga book, which I mention here simply because it sprang to mind. I never read it, have only recently become interested in yoga, but as a ten year old boy, the idea of women doing yoga in superhero outfits was most attractive. Here's Lyn in her heyday on the front of an album she released. One would assume it had a book with it but then again, when you talk about the seventies you can assume nothing:

I was sad to discover in the process of stealing this picture that Lyn is no longer with us. Shame. My Ma was really into her at the time and is still doing yoga after all these years. That's a legacy for you to hang your hat on.

Way off subject, I know.

Take a look at any book on amazon - absolutely any one at all. Choose your favourite in fact. If you look at the reviews there, there will always be a mixture of shock and awe. For every lover, there will be a hater. People who love excessively want to share with other just how good that book was. People who hate in an equal amount also wish to share their thoughts. My favourites are the people that leave a one star review because it took too long to come in the mail. There really is no hope for some people.

Thus, the whole reviews/commentary process is negated to the point that - as a publisher of my own material - I have figured out that the only way to get a jump start in the world is by word of mouth. How that works in the real world is a subject for another time but basically, people trust people. Book lovers trust other book lovers, but most importantly, great story lovers trust other story lovers. That's how the DaVinci Code sold a galaxy worth of books. That's how Harry Potter took off. Press rewind: that's how Lord of the Rings took off. Fast forward: that's how Jaws went interstellar. It's no great secret. Despite the advances of technology, we're all still human.

Well, apart from the people who leave reviews about the mail service on amazon.

More on this in the next instalment perhaps...

Censorship on children's books? I don't think so...

In a press release that got forwarded on to me this week - one of my friends was obviously too lazy to write about it himself - it was suggested that books should have a rating system to protect children. Here's the first two paragraphs from the release: "The film industry has a rating system to prevent underage individuals from watching movies deemed inappropriate, but a recent study from Brigham Young University found that many children’s novels that contain high levels of profanity can be purchased and read by any child. The study set to be published in the May 2012 issue of Mass Communication and Society found that profanity occurred over half of the time in books on the New York Times 40 best-selling adolescent (ages 9-14) novels. Profanity ranged from extremely offensive to mild and then was broken down further into categories such as the Federal Communication Commission’s seven dirty words, sexual words, and words referring to human waste (i.e. crap)."

I'm not sure what to think about this. It's hard enough to get my kids to read anything at all. Will a ratings system make their pool of choices even smaller or will a sexy 18 icon on the cover make it all the more attractive? For somebody who thrives on books, the fact that both of my daughters are pretty lame-ass when it comes to loving books is disappointing to say the least. Daughter No 1 is getting on for 16. I think she has read one whole book in her life and it was an X-Men graphic novel about five years ago. She's coming up to her exam period now and she needs to read something pretty pronto. Over the years I have paraded everything I can think of in front of her ranging from Coraline, Stardust and Sandman at the top end, right across to Twilight but even that didn't hold any stock. Two weeks, ago I took the bull by the horns yet again and bought her a brand new copy of Carrie - my thinking being that maybe she would rise to the occasion and use it as a shock and awe tactic. I found out tonight that she has made it all the way to page 14. I've not looked but I have no doubt that the damn thing probably starts on page seven or nine, like most paperbacks.

We even go book shopping occasionally - on these trips, I tell her she can have whatever she wants and she has even made some pretty decent choices over the years but every single one of them has simply been piled on top of the last one on the shelf.

Conversely, Daughter Number 2 is slightly better. We're currently rolling through the Spiderwick series and are on book four. I know she's eleven but I bought a complete set of them for myself (in one smart volume - you should grab it here) and read it in an evening. We'll get there I guess. Not so concerned about that one. She made a start on Clive Barker's Thief of Always once and we got quite far with that too. I think the lure of Christmas killed that little adventure though.

Looking back, between 11 and 15, I can tell you exactly what I was reading. The list is seriously phenomenal - I'll give you a taster. My own books of choice were things like  Stephen King, James Herbert and no doubt some dubious looking Pan short horror story collections. I has a slick collection of all the Holmes books that I had bought myself, a rough as hell second hand collection of Russ Tobin books from Stanley Morgan, read Jaws and The Island by Peter Benchley that I pinched off my mum. Waded through the 007 series, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Alistair Maclean that my old man had read and put on the shelf and then went even further back to chew up classics like The Toff series by John Creasey and The Saint that my uncle would leave at my grandmother's house whenever he flew in from Brussels. You can't beat some good old fashioned airport fodder. He also used to bring back these MAD Magazine paperbacks from his trips to the States which started a whole other type of love affair. At around 14, one of my friends found a pretty hardcore porn paperback called Hotel Orgy on his Dad's shelf and we passed that around too. There must have been at least ten of us that read it before it made it back home again. Rather than lead us on to 'harder' material, we went left of field to Leslie Thomas and discovered a whole other type of literature that seemed to be acceptable to read publicly even in school.

After that, I went back to horror, adventure - sometimes even got clever by tracking down the original text for the seminal Monkey show that was hot on TV back then. As I write this, all kinds of things are coming back to me: Dirty Harry movie tie-ins and spin-offs, Jack London's White Fang. I'll stop now but believe me, this is the very thin tip of the ice-berg. And yeah - we watched TV too. A hell of a lot of it. I also had a job. Two jobs by the time I was 15.

What's my point here? What good will censoring books do? It might stop kids buying age inappropriate material, but they will only get it somewhere else if they really want it - much like cigarettes, horror movies, booze, condoms and whatever else you need when you're underage and determined to get on with your life.

Here's the next paragraph from the press release:

“Some of the books in our sample had extremely high levels of profanity—one book had over 180 instances of the F-word alone. If these were made into movies, then there would be no question that they would be rated R; however, because they are in a book, we are somehow okay with adolescents being exposed to profanity in this degree. This is inconsistent and deserves discussion,” Dr. Sarah Coyne, the article’s author said. 

I'm not a bad Dad. Fact is, I'm a pretty great Dad with two really well balanced kids - they might even tell you that if you asked them - but we all live in the real world and all they have to do is come into the kitchen when I'm cooking and they can hear over 180 instances of 'fuck' in about five minutes. They're used to it. I'm a grown-up, I can swear. They are kids, so they can't. The exception to this, which I think is totally reasonable, is they have been taught that if they are ever approached by a stranger, they are to shout at the top of their lungs: "Get the fuck away from me motherfucker" and go for the eyes. We have not trialled this system but it made them laugh and they will remember it well if the need should ever arise. Anyway, here's the rest of the release:

“Hardly any research has examined books. We absolutely need to start focusing on this type of media in all aspects. Furthermore, there is almost no research on profanity in the media, even though the rating system tries to keep it away from younger kids. We don't know much about how prevalent it is, nor whether there are any effects of being exposed to profanity in the media,” Dr. Coyne said. The article titled, “A Helluva Read: Profanity in Adolescent Literature,”was written and researched by Drs. Sarah Coyne and Mark Callister, as well as Laura Ann Stockdale, David Nelson, and Brian Wells, all from Brigham Young University. It appears in Mass Communication and Society, Volume 15, Issue 3, 2012.

Dr Coyne needs a life - more likely though, he's probably been at university since he 'left' school and simply needs to get out more. Has he been in a school yard lately? Walked down a street? It's out there and I would much rather my kids were reading fucking books loaded with excitement and life affirming adventures than not. Sadly, I can't see that '18 sticker' making a whole lot of difference for me or them. Isn't this what they tried to do with the Comics Code logo?

I read all of these books spoken about above and hundreds more. I am well read. I am not stupid. I got by OK in school but the things that gave me a life, a job, a rapport, a girlfriend, a sense of humour, a reason to get up and a reason to go to bed where my books.

How I lost my kids to the Gods of anti-reading I'll never know but this is not the answer.

You know what, it's not even a problem.

Footnote: For the record, when we were 13 or 14, we went to see movies like Lemon Popsicle, Porky's, The Devil in Miss Jones, Bronx Warriors, Private Lessons - that's an endless list too. The ratings system didn't work then and it won't work now. Although to be fair, introducing multiplex cinemas and kicking the unholy crap out of indie cinema until it was forced to close would have stopped us, so well done everybody involved in that. Sitting in a cinema with your pals, surrounded by old men in big coats smoking unfiltered cigarettes in a movie you clearly shouldn't have been allowed in to see? Heaven. But that's a whole different story...