The Dan Brown Enigma

by Graham A Thomas

  Starbird’s books opened Blythe’s and Brown’s eyes to the way the Church had subjugated the Sacred Feminine. ‘My wife ordered a series of three historical films by the film maker Donna Rea,’ Brown explained. ‘I found the films absolutely fascinating. I was amazed to learn of the existence of a church publication called The Malleus Maleficarum.’ This book told its readers how to identify and then murder women who fitted the very broad definition of what the Church called a witch. ‘I began to realise that history barely mentioned the Church’s systemic subjugation of the Sacred Feminine,’ Brown continued. ‘The films also mentioned the Gnostic Gospels, prehistoric art honouring the female as life giver, the symbol of the inverted triangle – the womb, Catholicism, symbols, the serpent being linked to religion, the obliteration of 25,000 years of goddess worship by the ancient Greeks.’[48]

  But Brown had still not decided what the ‘big idea’ of the book was going to be. He toyed with writing a few sections just to get a feel for the setting and especially for the characters, but the basis of the book was not yet fully formed in his mind. Enter Blythe with the solution. ‘Blythe encouraged me to incorporate the theme of the Sacred Feminine and the goddess,’ said Brown. On a note inserted into the inside cover of the Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects ‘Blythe has written a note “goddess section” and on here, she has written “read all” by the Goddess entry.’

  So with encouragement from Blythe, the three films of Donna Rea and Starbird’s books, Brown was swayed to making the Sacred Feminine the central theme of his book. ‘Margaret Starbird’s books were a big inspiration – the image she created of Mary Magdalene being the bride, the lost sacred feminine, was very elegant – it seemed like the “big idea” – like the core of a classic fairy tale or enduring legend.’[49]

  In his acknowledgements Brown thanked the two women closest to him, his wife Blythe and his mother, and noted that the novel ‘draws heavily on the Sacred Feminine.’ In his witness statement he added, ‘If we spent half the intellect and money we spend on killing each other on solving problems, wouldn’t that be great? I kind of equate that with testosterone.’[50]

  It is highly likely that Blythe came up with most of the art references for The Da Vinci Code. One published account, according to David Shugarts, author of The Dan Brown Revelations, suggests that it was Blythe who came up with the reference to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland.[51] In the book, this is one of the last settings and it is where Sophie finds her brother and grandmother. It is also where she discovers her background. ‘The predominant source for my Rosslyn information was The Hiram Key, a lot of which is devoted to Rosslyn,’ Brown said, adding that Blythe made notes throughout the book on Rosslyn. ‘She also compiled two research documents called Rosslyn Castle Info and Rosslyn Highlights, much of which appears to come from The Hiram Key.’

  A commonly held belief about writers is that they toil away in loneliness and isolation. Indeed, this is an image that we have seen Brown himself use in writing at 4am in his cottage. But clearly throughout the research phase of his writing Blythe was there with him – to the degree that they started sharing information via email. ‘The reason for this,’ Brown explained in his witness statement, ‘is that more of our research was taking place on the internet, and email became the most efficient way of sharing information. For Blythe, sending me cut-and-paste text or a clickable link to a large website was easier than printing out dozens of pages in hard copy.’

  Using email was especially useful for Blythe to send her husband images from particular websites. He claims that photos helped him to write out his descriptive passages but ‘they printed poorly and ate up expensive printer toner; I preferred to see them online.’

  Blythe would bring information and research together from a wide variety of sources and then type it up into a document for Brown to use. ‘This new tool of email now meant that those research notes appeared in all kinds of different forms – her own extracts, clips from the internet, scans from source books, and website resource files. Sometimes I got a paper copy of those notes, usually an emailed copy, and sometimes both.’[52]

  While Brown does his own research, Blythe’s work in this field is key to providing the big picture, enabling him to produce what he regards as the most interesting parts for the reader. Most of the research is discarded for the final product. ‘My tendency toward heavy editing (“trimming the fat” as I called it) fuelled the ongoing push-and-pull between Blythe and me. Blythe constantly urged me to add more facts and more history. I was always slashing out long descriptive passages in an effort to keep the pace moving,’ Brown said. ‘I remember Blythe once gave me an enormous set of architectural/historical notes for a short flashback I was writing about Notre Dame Cathedral. When I had finished the section, she was frustrated by how little of work actually made the final cut. In these situations, I always remind Blythe I was trying to write a fast-moving page-turner.’[53]

  One particular document that Blythe produced for Brown for The Da Vinci Code was titled Constantine. Much of it was taken directly from the source and wasn’t in her own words. ‘It is not unusual for her to do this when we are working together,’ Brown said in his witness statement. ‘I will tell her the outline of a section of a book I have written and then ask her to go away and make a note of more specific information about the topic which I can use to elaborate my text.

  ‘She is better than me at producing a good summary of the material which we have looked at,’ he added. ‘If she finds a particular source which has many of the relevant facts collected together, she will make her note from that source. Sometimes she combines a number of sources in her notes to me. Sometimes she adds notes to me to look at other sources as well. There is no fixed pattern.’

  One thing that makes this document on Constantine interesting is that a lot of it came from the book Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, whose authors launched a court case against Brown claiming he had plagiarised their work. (We will look at that in greater detail later.) A second thing is that Blythe often transcribed paragraphs directly from the work she was looking at, to ensure that her husband had the exact data he’d asked for.

  Blythe doesn’t just email a document over to her husband – she often peppers it with notes to draw her husband’s attention to a particular point while he’s writing. She explains: ‘The document says, “Keep in mind these important references” and then there is a list of several points or themes and a corresponding source and page number.’ She would pass notes to Dan pointing out something she felt was important, as she did with the Constantine document where she noted, ‘Throughout my readings of all my books, this smell or perfume for some reason keeps coming up in relation to Mary Magdalene. I have seen this many times.’ Brown said that she was referring to many references she’d discovered regarding a perfume that was connected to Mary Magdalene.

  ‘Our studies into the origins of the Christian movement and the ancient mysteries continue to this day. Our research and Blythe’s note taking is a continual process,’ Brown said in his 2005 witness statement. Both he and Blythe knew that they had something with The Da Vinci Code, but before they began that project they went through the three preceding novels that were poorly promoted to see what could have been done better.

  Even with Blythe’s encouragement, support and collaboration on his first three novels, Brown had felt like giving up, so it’s fair to say that without Blythe, Dan Brown would probably be nowhere.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  DIGITAL FORTRESS

  Initially I had been indignant that the NSA was reading emails. But subsequently I realised their work constituted a fascinating moral grey area.

  DAN BROWN

  Digital Fortress was the first of Dan Brown’s novels and was the only one he wrote on spec. ‘The thrill of being a published author (187 Men To Avoid), combined with George Wieser’s words of encouragement, my newfound fascination with NSA, and the vacation reading of Sidney Sheldon’s The
Doomsday Conspiracy, all had begun to give me confidence that I could indeed write a novel,’ he said. ‘I quite literally woke up one morning and decided to write a thriller that delved into NSA. That’s when I started writing Digital Fortress.’ [54]

  Like all of Brown’s books, the core of the story is built around a puzzle that the protagonist must solve in a short space of time. Brown builds the pace of the book deftly, taking the reader from Spain to Washington and back again many times. He uses flashbacks to build background information then brings the reader back into the present to push the story forward. So how does Digital Fortress stack up against the Curzon Group’s five principles of thriller writing?

  For its entertainment value, we can go to Brown for the answer: feedback from the Digital Fortress website was very positive. ‘I get a lot of email from excited readers,’ Brown said. ‘It seems people have really connected with the timely “moral issues” in the novel.’ Readers have also enjoyed the inside look at the National Security Agency (NSA) that Brown exposed in the book. ‘Every now and then I get an irate letter from some technician telling me that the gadgets in Digital Fortress could never exist in real life (they all do), and I have to forward some article or photograph confirming my research.’[55]

  But as we have seen, Brown is an author who is able to stretch or embellish the truth when it suits him. There is, however, no shortage of independent reviews of Digital Fortress. ‘I found the book fast-paced and engaging,’ said one. ‘I almost literally didn’t put it down until I was done. I don’t take many forays into the world of fiction, but if you like cyber-thrillers I highly recommend you pick this book up and read it.’[56]

  Another reviewer said it was an exciting read, that the subject matter was thought-provoking and that the plot was fascinating. ‘Digital Fortress is an example of the techno-thriller at its very best. But what makes Digital Fortress stand out from the crowd are its other elements: a real love story and an examination of the struggles between right and wrong and protection of the public versus the preservation of that same public’s privacy.’[57]

  John Barnes of the Washington Pi Journal reviewed Digital Fortress in 2004 and he too was complimentary. He said Brown had succeeded in taking him from one end of the story to the other in a single sitting. ‘Twists and turns are Brown’s stock in trade and he paces their unveiling in a manner that is properly sinister,’ he wrote. ‘I won’t claim this is Pulitzer Prize literature but it is a jolly good read.’

  The website Curled Up With A Good Book, concluded that Brown had written a ‘cutting edge techno-thriller’. The reviewer also said that the book had pace like that of a speeding plane with copious amounts of suspense and with ‘interesting characterisations and a romantic entanglement thrown in for good measure, Digital Fortress compels the reader to wonder whether big brother is really watching everything everywhere.’[58]

  In his interview with Claire White, of the Internet Writing Journal web pages, Brown said that many people had emailed the website saying how much they enjoyed the book because it had other elements than computers. ‘I worry sometimes that, because we talk about cryptography and the NSA that people think, “Oh, it’s a computer book,” but it’s so much more than that.’ [59]

  The book was also reviewed on Amazon’s website, where the general public get their chance to say what they think about a book. These are not professional reviews but the opinions of the readers must be taken into account in assessing how entertaining Digital Fortress is. ‘There are enough twists and turns to keep you guessing and a lot of high, gee-whiz-level information about encryption, code breaking, and the role they play in international politics,’ says one contributor. This reviewer also tells readers to take an entire afternoon and do nothing but read the book ensuring that you have enough ‘finger food on hand for supper, because you’ll probably want to read it from cover to cover.’

  However, the reviews were not all roses. Brown has his detractors and once The Da Vinci Code had broken, sales of Digital Fortress rocketed, bringing the negative comments. Yet it may be that some of the bad reviews of Digital Fortress are by people who have an axe to grind with Brown because they disliked The Da Vinci Code.

  For example, one reviewer said the romance in the book was cheesy and that it made a book ‘about national-level cryptography seem oversimplified into a romance novel that was set against a life-or-death backdrop.’ The reviewer went on to say that if the reader wanted to learn about the goings on at the NSA or about computer programming or codes then Digital Fortress was a good book to read but ‘for plot and style, it’s just the usual Dan Brown.’[60]

  Another reviewer said, ‘I was most disappointed to discover that the betraying character – which appears in all of his books and is, I think, supposed to shock readers – becomes ridiculously easy to identify.’[61]

  Finally, a review by Magda Healey published on the Bookbag website in July 2004 condemned Digital Fortress as a book to read if the reader has nothing else to do. She said that the writing was worse ‘than The Da Vinci Code,’ and that his characters were unrealistic and the dialogue was wooden. She did not recommend the book at all, giving it just two stars.

  So there are good reviews and bad – most are good – but is Digital Fortress an entertaining read? There is one easy way to tell: sales figures. In 2005 the Times Online published the figures for Brown’s books and even then they were astounding. ‘The Da Vinci Code is estimated to have sold, 2,225,118 copies in Britain, and his two backlist titles Digital Fortress and Deception Point, previously unpublished here – have shifted over 600,000 copies each.’[62]

  Based on the reviews, the comments emailed to Brown and the sales figures, we can say that Digital Fortress meets the Curzon Group’s first principle of entertainment value and does so in spades. From the first page to the last it is filled with tension, pace and suspense. Whether it is good writing or not is another matter.

  Digital Fortress is an interesting story. It’s set inside the US National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors communications from around the world, via the internet and email, for anything that would be a threat to US security. The core of the NSA is a multi-billion dollar computer called TRANSLTR that has three million processors enabling it to decode any encrypted messages almost instantly and the NSA to pick up potential terrorist threats.

  TRANSLTR is merrily decoding thousands of messages from around the world until suddenly it comes across a code that it can’t break. The agency calls in its top cryptographer, beautiful mathematical genius Susan Fletcher, to help break the deadlock. Without her knowledge, the agency has also brought her fiancé, David Becker, into the equation. An expert in foreign languages and a professor who has assisted the NSA before, Becker is sent to Spain to retrieve the ‘kill code’ or pass key that will enable TRANSLTR to break the code.

  As the story unravels, we discover that a former employee of NSA’s Crypto division, the brilliant Ensei Tankado, has written this unbreakable code called Digital Fortress because he believes that TRANSLTR is immoral and that the world should be aware that the US is listening in to everything. However, Tankado is murdered in Spain before Becker can get to him. Becker believes the code is written on a ring that Tankado gave to a tourist just before he died and Becker needs to find that ring. From this moment on Becker is in a race against the clock to get the ring back while being hunted by an assassin bent on killing him.

  Meanwhile, Susan Fletcher is working hard to break the code and as she does, she uncovers layers of lies and deception. The plot twists and turns as people she thinks she can trust are the ones who can’t be trusted and her world is turned on its head. She soon discovers that Digital Fortress is more than just an unbreakable code: it has the power to bring down the US government’s entire security systems, which, once breached, will open up all of the US government secrets – including the launch codes for nuclear missiles – to hackers, terrorists and any other malignant attack!

  As we have seen Brown got his ‘b
ig idea’ for the book while he was teaching English at Phillips Exeter. ‘In the spring of ’95, two US Secret Service agents showed up on the campus of Phillips Exeter and detained one of our students claiming he was a threat to national security. … He wasn’t, of course, and not much came of it. The incident however really stuck with me.’[63]

  Brown couldn’t understand how the Secret Service had known what the student had written in his email. It bothered him, so he began to do research to find the answer. The more he looked, the more shocked he was. ‘What I found out absolutely floored me. I found out there is an intelligence agency as large as the CIA… that only about two per cent of Americans knows exists.’ That agency was the NSA. ‘The agency functions like an enormous vacuum cleaner sucking in intelligence data from around the globe and processing it for subversive material. The NSA’s supercomputers scan email and other communiqués, looking for dangerous word combinations like “kill” and “Clinton” in the same sentence. The more I learned about this ultra-secret agency and the fascinating moral issues surrounding national security and civilian privacy, the more I realised it was a great backdrop for a novel. That’s when I started writing Digital Fortress.’

  The second of the five principles of the Curzon Group is insight, so does the book reflect the world around it and provide insight on the subject matter? Brown researches all his novels meticulously. Most of this investigative work has been done with Blythe but the fact-finding for Digital Fortress he did himself and the research is evident throughout the novel. For example, in the opening chapters of Digital Fortress, Brown tells us about how NSA’s technical people were easily able to intercept email. This, he states, was in the early days of the internet in the 1980s: ‘The internet was not the new home computer revelation that most believed. It had been created by the Department of Defence three decades earlier – an enormous network of computers designed to provide secure government communication in the event of nuclear war.’