Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (14 page)

For so small a town as Maycomb, Alabama (the setting of
To Kill a Mockingbird
), there are a surprising number of secret societies flourishing in its midst. When Dill and Jem and Scout get mobbed up, creating their own summertime drama club, the rules are clear—anyone lacking an imagination and a taste for danger and a willingness to test authority need not apply. Nor should any adults even consider membership. These kids are picky. They target the stiff and phony neighbors as objects of their derision and reenact lampoons of everyone up and down the street.

Little by little, with Atticus’s help, the kids learn a modicum of respect for some of the grown-ups who are the objects of their parodies, and each time another lesson is absorbed, the secret society must slightly alter its rules of engagement. The one person who stays within their sights, however, is Boo Radley, the mysterious recluse ostracized by the community and transformed into a bogeyman by the children.

Although he’s the focus of their heckling, Boo isn’t daunted but works in the shadows to win favor the same way Brody earned his place aboard the
Orca
, by keeping his distance while he observed the society’s rules and behaviors, adjusting his own actions accordingly. Or the way that Mitch McDeere worked his ass off to qualify for a spot at the holiest of holies conference table.

It is the nature of secrecy, Miss Maudie seems to say, the nature of insulated systems, to stunt those who are imprisoned within them. The Radley household has isolated itself and become some kind of terrible echo chamber, and whatever was wrong with Boo before has probably metastasized into something far worse after all these years of being shut in.

Boo studies the children’s comings and goings with the same focus Sheriff Brody employs on Quint. He places sly offerings in the hollow of a tree. He repairs Jem’s torn and mislaid trousers and surreptitiously returns them to the youngster. Staying out of sight, he courts the children while observing from a safe distance the workings of their closed circle.

For Boo knows very well what everyone in Maycomb knows, that mixing one clan with another, one race with another, even one brand of Christianity with another, is forbidden. Secret societies abound in this small town. Everyone is segregated from everyone else, by race, by gender, by religious practice, by family lineage, and by narrow definitions of class. Scout is astonished when Atticus describes the trashiest family in town as having a snobbish aspect. “He said that the Ewells were a member of an exclusive society made up of Ewells.”

Add to the list those missionary ladies who meet in the Finches’ front parlor. Those good ladies are as exclusive and rigid in their costumes and ceremonial customs as the Mrunas, the African tribes these silly old women fantasize about saving. But it’s not just the good Christian white ladies who are exclusionary. Many in the black congregation of the First
Purchase African M.E. Church murmur uneasily when Scout sits in their midst. “I wants to know why you bringin’ white chillun to nigger church,” one of them wants to know. Their society has its regulations as well.

Groups like Opus Dei or its elite squads of killers, or the New York Mob, all employ a highly organized structure. Like the partners of Bendini, Lambert & Locke, they are a caricature of a tight-knit family, a family that operates under strict guidelines. For one thing, in Don Corleone’s secret society, as in Bendini, Lambert’s, you do not resign your membership without risking death. Those who have tried to bail have not been heard from since.

The secret societies operating within
To Kill a Mockingbird
are as treacherous as those in
The Godfather
and
The Firm
. Though it would seem on first look that the ground rules for the play group that Scout, Jem, and Dill are members of are relaxed and easygoing. After all, Dill is readily admitted into their club when he proves himself to be at least as imaginative and devoted to playacting and daredevil stunts as they are. These are kids just being kids, right?

Not really. For their merciless targeting and demonizing of Boo Radley uncomfortably echoes the lynch mob that puts Tom Robinson in its lethal sights. Sure, they’re kids, but this threesome is also a closed system that feeds on suspicion, prejudice, and fearmongering. They have copied—innocently, of course—the group dynamics of the KKK.

As the story concludes, Boo is close by when Scout and Jem are attacked on their way home from a school play. In a protective fury, Boo Radley murders their attacker, and this act of violence turns out to be the price of admission into the Finches’ world.

Once Boo is on equal footing with the Finch children, their
clique disbands. Just as Bendini, Lambert & Locke cannot absorb one truly honest man like Mitch McDeere and just as Robert Langdon single-handedly penetrates and dissolves the centuries-old, murderous wing of Opus Dei, Boo Radley brings an end to the Finch kids’ gang of three.

In an event that would have seemed unthinkable a few chapters earlier, Boo is welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Finches’ home. At the end of that traumatic evening, with Jem laid out from his injuries, Boo is escorted home by Scout. Carefully protected perimeters are broken, secrets are revealed, and there is even a physical touch between Boo and Scout.

Standing on Boo Radley’s front porch and seeing the world from his vantage point, Scout grasps how their summer threesome was organized around an exclusionary principle. They’ve persecuted this guy, ganged up on him in a childish reenactment of the lynch mob coming to string up Tom Robinson. It is the moral of the story. A simplistic one, that’s true, but a message with profound resonance. Walk in another man’s shoes, Atticus says. Empathize. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

Whether it’s the KKK, the Ewell clan or the Cunninghams, the First Purchase Church, the missionary ladies, or Jem, Scout, and Dill acting out childish games, secret societies, no matter how harmless they may appear, can be training camps for intolerance and bigotry and thus inimical to a fair and open society.

The novel stands forcefully against the destructive nature of secret groups, while demonstrating how they can be altered by the least among us, by children whose sense of equality is our hope for social progress. Among other things, it is this dreamy, hazy, hopeful stew of idealism and wishful thinking,
leavened with just enough hard-edged skepticism, that helped make
To Kill a Mockingbird
a much-loved and perennial bestseller.

What
The Hunt for Red October
is to submarines,
The Da Vinci Code
is to secret societies. The Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, Freemasons, Knights of Templar … oh, the list is long. The novel is bubbling over with highly secretive brotherhoods that have been around for centuries, working behind the scenes to rig world affairs. Turns out they are even engaged in an ongoing battle with other secret societies and occasional lone crusaders like Robert Langdon whose goal is to rip aside the veil that conceals their nefarious deeds.

The Da Vinci Code
takes its place at the head of a long list of popular novels that capitalize on the widespread suspicion that deceitful and universal powers are conspiring against them, a list that includes such diverse works as Ayn Rand’s
The Fountainhead
and
Atlas Shrugged
to
Dr. Strangelove
and Umberto Eco’s
Foucault’s Pendulum
.

Using a favorite target of conspiracy novels of the past,
The Da Vinci Code
marches deep into a minefield of politically incorrect and highly charged views about Roman Catholics. Though the folks who run Opus Dei’s website would have you believe that they are a “Catholic institution founded by Saint Josemaría Escrivá … [whose mission] is to spread the message that work and circumstances of everyday life are occasions for growing closer to God, for serving others, and for improving society,” Dan Brown paints a starkly different fictional portrait.

Employing what sound like facts copied and pasted from newspaper accounts, in one short paragraph alone he associates Opus Dei with doping its new members so they will believe they’ve experienced religious ecstasy, then describes another new recruit who gives himself an almost fatal infection by beating himself with his
cilice
belt, and then provides a third example of the depravity of the organization, which conned the life savings from a young man, a scam that drove him to attempt suicide.

Suddenly Corleone’s Mob seems warm and cuddly in comparison.

Every inch of forward movement in the plot of
The Da Vinci Code
is propelled by one attempt after another to expose one shadowy secret society after the next. To break the code, to solve the puzzle, to penetrate the layers of high-tech security of the Depository Bank of Zurich, to use the key that fits the lock to open the safe that hides some titillating secret, to locate the keystone that explains the sign of the Rose, to interpret the “flash card catechism” of the Tarot, to follow the labyrinthine trail of clues to the wooden box that holds the …

Oh well, it’s easy to see the narrative structure. A series of Chinese boxes. Open one, there’s another; open that one, it sends you running for your life in a new direction, chasing one permutation after another of the greatest secret of all time, forever pursued by an albino monk who is determined to keep the secrets hidden. This single device drives the story forward at breakneck speed and is the source of nearly every thrill and chill, all of it driven by a single dramatic goal: to expose the secret, the awesome fact that “the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene … the mother of the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ.”

Apparently there must be a bit of the conspiracy theorist in all of us, or at least in the eighty million readers of
The Da Vinci Code
. To some critics of the novel, this plot device grows quickly tiresome, a kind of one-trick narrative pony in which paranoia has run amok. After a few hundred pages of this, they argue, we could easily find ourselves questioning the Girl Scouts and the Brownies and all those other institutions we so foolishly thought we could trust. They’re all devious and sinister, no doubt playing some part in the grand cabal that has infiltrated every corner of Western art and culture.

Though in the end Langdon’s efforts manage to save his own skin and Sophie’s, we discover that the Holy Grail is more slippery than Robert led us to believe. Marie Chauvel, a minor character who appears near the end of the novel, puts it bluntly. Robert Langdon’s quest has been little more than an elaborate wild-goose chase: “The Holy Grail is simply a grand idea … a glorious unattainable treasure that somehow, even in today’s world of chaos, inspires us.”

Well, okay, so the Holy Grail was not a golden chalice or some other fabulous artifact but merely an abstraction. Still, few would deny this was a pulse-quickening ride. A little like the roller coaster: Once you’re done, your stomach is hinky, your hair is mussed, but otherwise you’re back exactly where you began—in a world where elaborate confederacies continue their knavish skullduggery. A world where our last best hope rests on the broad shoulders of a dauntless interpreter of symbols, the ultimate defender of the proletariat, a man who has made it his mission to penetrate and expose secret societies.

American readers are drawn to novels that expose the inner workings of secret societies for a simple reason. They want to comprehend the silent forces that shape their destinies, to have a few “privileged glimpses” into the hidden boiler rooms that power our world. Furthermore, as a resolutely democratic people, we have a natural suspicion of institutions, public or private, that might in some way undermine our personal liberties. We’re distrustful of organizations that lack transparency, that perform their rituals behind closed doors.

On a regular basis, bestsellers like these enforce our rights under the Freedom of Information Act—they kick open the door to the smoke-filled room and expose the scheming rascals and neutralize their power. Those novels that allow all comers access into exclusive and esoteric worlds get extra credit in the popular culture. Even more credit is given to those books like the ones on our list, which portray the triumph of a righteous individual over the often dehumanizing prejudices of a secret group.

J
ourneys of this type have mythic echoes as old as the
Epic of Gilgamesh
(one of the earliest-known narrative tales), a story in which the hero left the safety of the walled city to trek off to the edges of the world. This narrative structure, the hero’s journey, as it is sometimes called, was the basis of Joseph Campbell’s landmark work
The Hero with a Thousand
Faces
. In our contemporary era, the same structural underpinnings are at work in popular films from
Star Wars
to
The Wizard of Oz
, as Christopher Vogler so thoroughly describes in his practical guide for aspiring Hollywood screen writers,
The Writer’s Journey
.

A character is called to adventure. After initially refusing the call, he is galvanized into action by some event and leaves the safety of his ordinary world, crossing the threshold into a foreign land. Relying on mentors, some of them with supernatural abilities, and tested by various enemies, he eventually reaches a perilous place that Vogler calls “the inmost cave.” There he faces some terrible ordeal but is finally able to summon sufficient inner resources to conquer his adversary. Afterward he begins the long trek back, which usually involves confronting a second ordeal before he can return home with the grail he has wrested from his antagonist. Think Dorothy, her three mentoring friends, the Wicked Witch’s dreadful prison cell, and those magical red shoes.