The Dan Brown Enigma (11 page)

Another Amazon reviewer called it a book ‘stuffed with hackneyed clichés, it’s worse than Mills & Boon or a 16-year-old on a creative writing course. Obviously for the less discerning reader yet it has sold millions. A literary snob? Damn right I am. There’s enough junk in life these days as it is.’
[97]

The reactions to
Angels & Demons
covers both ends of the spectrum and everything in between. As one reviewer put it, ‘you either hate it or you love it.’ Many reviewers give the book five stars while others give it one star, but the majority of reader reactions are positive, such as: ‘The book starts slowly but as you begin to get into the thick of it, the book picks up pace and takes you on an astounding journey, fast-paced, intriguing and all in all a fantastic read.’
[98]

One of the themes running through many reviews, good and bad, is that there are many inaccuracies in the book. Indeed, the Wikipedia entry on
Angels & Demons
states that in the first edition some of the locations in Rome were wrong as was the use of Italian, which was corrected in subsequent editions.

Where the real problems lie is in the areas of science, technology and history. For example, the antimatter discussions that take place in the book claim that the substance can be produced in practical quantities that could lead to a limitless source of energy. But CERN has published a paper on the facts – which Brown placed in the book – stating that it takes more energy to create antimatter than the substance actually produces.

Here’s what Brown said about antimatter in the
Angels & Demons
section of his witness statement: ‘Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5% efficient). Antimatter is 100,000 times more powerful than rocket fuel. A single gram contains the energy of a 20 kiloton atomic bomb – the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In addition to being highly explosive, antimatter is extremely unstable and ignites when it comes in contact with anything… even air.’

Brown also claimed that antimatter can only be stored by suspending it inside a vacuum in an electromagnetic field. Once that field fails, the antimatter collides with its container, resulting in a matter/antimatter conversion known by physicists as annihilation. ‘CERN is now regularly producing small quantities of antimatter in their research for future energy sources. Antimatter holds tremendous promise; it creates no pollution or radiation, and a single droplet could power New York City for a full day.’

However, on 10 May 2009 an American cable television network aired a documentary called
Angels & Demons Decoded
. In it an official from CERN suggested that the organisation had only been able to produce approximately 10 billionths of a gram of antimatter over the previous 20 years and that the explosive potential of that amount was not much more than a firecracker – certainly not as powerful as Brown had claimed.
[99]

Still, this book stacks up well against the five principles of thriller writing. People consider it to be an entertaining, fast-paced read. Brown’s research into the Vatican, the art in Vatican City, the architecture of Rome and its churches, and the secret society of the Illuminati provides the reader with insight into the inner workings of the Vatican, reflecting the world around the characters. Like Brown’s other books, this one is written to a formula that Brown himself has described – essentially blending fact with fiction and taking a character out of his comfort zone and pitting them against a ticking clock and some ruthless villains. At its heart is the adventure – in this case a treasure hunt to find the codes that lead to the discovery of the canister. And finally, it is written in a stylish way that Brown has developed since
Digital Fortress
.

Although the book has sold well since
The Da Vinci Code,
initial sales were very poor. Though Brown’s publisher had changed from St Martin’s Press to Simon & Schuster, the promised publicity campaigns never happened. ‘They promised to give the book considerably more publicity and support than my previous publishers,’ Brown explained. ‘Their proposed publicity included a much larger print run (60,000), advertising in major newspapers, web advertising, a 12-city tour, an e-book release, and other exciting prospects.’
[100]

Despite good reviews, the poor sales of both his novels left Brown struggling with the desire to write a third one. But he had to do it. He was contracted to the publisher for a third novel. The only thing that kept him going was the possibility that one of the novels might be optioned for a feature film. ‘At the time, that was a big financial incentive,’ Brown said. ‘I did receive numerous offers for the film rights to
Angels & Demons
, but I turned them down as they were not enough money and not with major studios.’
[101]

Strapped for cash, Brown and Blythe found themselves visiting low-profile publishing events where they sold copies of
Angels & Demons
out of the boot of their car. Brown was seriously considering giving up writing and returning to teaching but he and Blythe knew that they had something special from the feedback they were getting. ‘The few readers who read
Angels & Demons
had gone wild for it,’ Brown said in his witness statement. ‘The store where we buy most of our books, The Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire, was hand-selling my books, but the superstores still did not even know my name.’

Brown kept on trying to get the book known but failed. ‘I was told that the window of opportunity in book publishing was only a few weeks and that an author needed to reach a critical mass of readers very quickly after release or the bookstores would return his books to the publisher to make room for the next round of new books. This is why large scale, coordinated launches are needed to make a success of most books. I realised I could not do it alone, no matter how hard I tried.’

Commander James D Swanson of the United States Navy was short, plump and crowding forty. He had jet black hair topping a pink cherubic face, and with the deep permanent creases of laughter lines radiating from his eyes and curving round his mouth he was a dead ringer for the cheerful, happy-go-lucky extrovert who is the life and soul of the party where the guests park their brains along with their hats and coats. That, anyway, was how he struck me at first glance but on the reasonable assumption that I might very likely find some other qualities in the man picked to command the latest and most powerful nuclear submarine afloat I took a second and closer look at him and this time I saw what I should have seen the first time if the dank grey fog and winter dusk settling down over the Firth of Clyde hadn’t made seeing so difficult. His eyes. Whatever his eyes were they weren’t those of the gladhanding wisecracking bon vivant. They were the coolest, clearest grey eyes I’d ever seen.
[102]

T
he above quote is the opening to Alistair MacLean’s
Ice Station Zebra.
It sets the stage for a fast-paced, tension-filled, edge-of-your-seat thriller. There are similarities to Brown’s
Deception Point
: MacLean’s story takes the reader straight into the action as does the prologue to
Deception Point
. But from the Prologue onwards
Deception Point
takes more than a hundred pages for the story to really begin. From that point on, Brown builds the tension to the final nail-biting climax. But
Deception Point
is essentially an American novel set against the backdrop of a presidential election. If the reader has no interest in American politics then those first hundred pages will be tedious indeed.

Brown’s ‘big idea’ for this book was based on the press stories about the string of failures that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had suffered and the calls to hand the agency over to the private sector. ‘I became very interested in the question of whether it made sense for my tax dollars to fund trips to Mars while the very school in which I was teaching could barely afford an art teacher.’
[103]

Brown built his story around this premise, weaving in characters and locations, again blending fact with fiction. But while MacLean tells his story in the narrow, confined location of a submarine and an ice station on a glacier in the Arctic Circle, Brown uses a much broader canvas to tell his story: from a glacier off Canada’s Ellesmere Island to Washington DC to a research vessel off the coast of New Jersey. And while MacLean tells his story simply and with minimal fuss, Brown peppers his novel with a wide variety of information covering technical equipment, geological data, physics and much more.

Why compare Brown with MacLean,
Deception Point
with
Ice Station Zebra
? Both books have similar plots and similar locations. In
Deception Point
a meteorite has been found buried in the ice of a glacier and a team of experts has been sent up there to authenticate NASA’s claims of extraterrestrial life found as fossils in the meteorite. But all isn’t what it appears to be and soon it all unravels as the protagonist finds someone is trying to kill her to stop her from telling the world about what is really going on.

In
Ice Station Zebra
a US nuclear submarine is sent up to the Arctic Circle in response to a distress call from a British ice station that has suffered a catastrophic fire. The boat goes there to pick up survivors and find out what happened. However, it is soon apparent that the fire was deliberate and that the expedition is far more than a rescue. It is to retrieve a capsule of microfilm that has been ejected from a Russian spy satellite and landed near Zebra. The film contains images of all the nuclear missile installations around the world and the Russians want it back.

While
Ice Station Zebra
is a much older novel than
Deception Point
, it is an excellent example of the formula thriller writing that made MacLean’s early work so good. The question is, does
Deception Point
stack up against it?

Ice Station Zebra
feels real. The reader goes right into the story along with the narrator. The description of the cold and the lonely icecap comes from MacLean’s own experiences as an able seaman aboard
HMS Royalist
during the Second World War. MacLean did two tours aboard this cruiser on the Arctic Convoys and learned about numbing cold first-hand. The same ship later took him to the Pacific theatre where he saw action escorting carrier groups against Japanese targets in Sumatra, Burma and Malaysia. This wartime experience can be seen in his early works, including
Ice Station Zebra
.

Having been at sea for most of the war MacLean knew the sea and what life was like aboard ship. He understood the mind-numbing cold and the bleakness of the Arctic Circle from his days in the Arctic Convoys. For example: ‘We flitted through the howling darkness of that nightmare lunar landscape. We were no longer bowed under the weight of heavy packs. Our backs were to that gale-force wind so that for every laborious plodding step we had made on our way to Zebra, we now covered five.’ Or: ‘After perhaps four hundred yards the ice wall ended so abruptly, leading to so sudden and unexpected an exposure to the whistling fury of the ice-storm that I was bowled completely off my feet.’

Ian Fleming said the key to writing a good thriller is to write about what you know, to base the book on something that happened and build it from there. MacLean used his personal experiences in his books, but what about Brown? There is no record that Brown ever served aboard a ship or that he spent any length of time in the Arctic Circle, so for him to write about being stuck out in the open on a glacier and make it sound real, must be from a combination of painstaking research and a vivid imagination.

‘Outside the habisphere, the katabatic wind roaring down the glacier was nothing like the ocean winds Tolland was accustomed to. On the ocean, wind was a function of tides and pressure fronts and came in gusting ebbs and flows. The katabatic, however, was a slave to simple physics – heavy cold air rushing down a glacial incline like a tidal wave. It was the most resolute gale force Tolland had ever experienced.’

So how does
Deception Point
stack up against the Curzon Group’s five elements of a good thriller ?

The ‘big idea’ for
Deception Point
came from the research Brown had done on
Digital Fortress
. He’d finished writing
Angels & Demons
and needed a break, as he explained in his witness statement. ‘I was exhausted from the research and writing of such a complicated religious thriller,’ he said. ‘Even though I had lots of viable material left over from all of my research on religion/art/Rome and the Templars etc., I felt like I needed a change of pace. I decided to write what I later termed a “palate cleanser”.’

Having researched and written about the covert and secretive organisations (the National Security Agency in
Digital Fortress
and the clandestine brotherhood of the Illuminati in
Angels & Demons
), Brown needed something different to write about. ‘I found myself hard pressed to come up with a more secretive topic,’ he said. ‘Fortunately, I had recently learned of another US intelligence agency, more covert even than the National Security Agency. This new agency, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), figured prominently in my third novel,
Deception Point
.’
[104]

At the same time, the press had also been commenting on NASA’s string of failures, saying that the agency was becoming a bottomless pit for taxpayer’s money without much coming back in return. Weren’t there more important things closer to home for taxpayers’ money to be spent on? ‘Then again,’ Brown said, ‘could we as human beings really give up our quest for discovery in space?
Deception Point
centred on issues of morality in politics, human progress, national security, and classified technology. The crux of the novel was the link between NASA, the military, and the political pressures of big budget technology.’