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Why Dan Brown must win

Nick Cohen

YOU DO not have to love the English language to disapprove of The Da Vinci Code. A passing respect for your mother tongue is enough to make you wince when Dan Brown takes a chainsaw to the old girl and slices her into clichés and easy-to-assemble sentences.

Why millions of people have bought it is a riddle beyond Brown's power to solve. It is a page-turner, to be fair, with a mystery that pushes you past the arthritic dialogue of the stock characters.

But when readers turn to the final page with the reasonable expectation that the mystery of the Holy Grail will be explained, Brown refuses to oblige. Like the mediocre reporter who can't get to the bottom of a story, he says words to the effect of "perhaps we'll never know the truth" and leaves it there.

The problem with The Da Vinci Code is that there is no ending to spoil. If there has been a worse book published in the past 25 years, then Holy Blood, Holy Grail could well be it. Its three authors present as plausible historical speculation their theory that Jesus did not die on the cross, but had a child with Mary Magdalene.

Like so many expats, they moved to France, and their descendants became Merovingian kings in the Dark Ages. The heirs of Jesus survive to this day, feared by the Vatican and protected by an enigmatic institution, the Priory of Sion.

The authors did not withdraw the book when journalists found that their claims about the Priory of Sion came from documents forged on a cheap stencil by a French neo-fascist conman called Pierre Planchard, who said he was the rightful Merovingian king of France. There was no need to. Exposure of the hoax did not dent their sales, which now stand at around two million. Nor has it harmed The Da Vinci Code, which repeats parts of the story. Around five million British readers have bought one or both of these books.

How much of The Da Vinci Code is — ahem — `borrowed' from Holy Blood, Holy Grail is the subject of the plagiarism case at the High Court in London that enters what should be its final week. The Holy Blood authors are not saying that Brown had copied chunks of their work verbatim.

Instead, they are suing him for taking some of their ideas, researching them, playing with them, and turning them into a novel. If they win, experts believe a chill will go through cultural life as publishers face the next to impossible task of separating original thoughts from other people's thoughts.

I hate to be the one who has to say it, but Brown needs to win. If he doesn't, free thought may be stifled in the name of protecting ideas.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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