by Michael Haag
THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR
Aged five, Dan wrote his first book: The Giraffe, the Pig and the Pants on Fire. It came out as a limited one-copy homemade edition, which he still proudly owns. His sister is a painter, and his brother Gregory a musician. Gregory Brown has composed and performed the Missa Charles Darwin, which instead of a sacred text uses excepts from On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and Darwin’s correspondence.
That was one way to combine the religious and the rationalist strands in the Brown family; Dan, in his Robert Langdon novels, has found others. ‘My mother was not at all shy about her Christianity’, he says. The licence plate of his mother’s red Volvo read KYRIE, meaning Lord in Greek, as in the chanted prayer Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy. ‘Her world was my reality, I believed in it.’ But he also believed in his father’s world of mathematics and science, and he enjoyed going out on summer nights and listening to his father talk about astronomy and about distant worlds and infinity. His father’s white mini van bore a licence plate reading METRIC. Dan Brown was happy to live in those two worlds until the ‘all-knowing age of thirteen’. That was the year he asked a priest which story was true, science or religion, to which he received the answer, ‘Nice boys don’t ask that question’.
Since the Renaissance and the time of Galileo, says Dan Brown, both science and religion have been vying for control of the truth. ‘Religion wanted me to accept everything on faith which I found difficult, so I gravitated into science. But after a while the ground became mushy – relativity, uncertainty; matter does not exist, it is only a form of energy. But religious texts describe God as energy, and so the line between science and religion is starting to blur’.
FROM HERESY TO FLYING SAUCERS
Exeter, a New England town of barely 14,000 people, stands a few miles inland from the coast. It’s located just up the Squamscott River, named after the Native American tribe from which the Reverend John Wheelwright bought the land in 1638. Wheelwright and 135 others were refugees from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Puritan theocracy; they were lucky to have been exiled and not hanged, for the charge against them was heresy. On 4 July the following year, they declared their settlement, named after Exeter in Devon, England, to be a self-governing and independent republic, and in 1775 it became the capital of revolutionary New Hampshire. The local Gilman family donated the first plot of land on which Phillips Exeter Academy now stands; they later contributed a Founding Father and a signatory of the United States Constitution, and one of their descendants now sits on the town’s Board of Selectmen. An Exeter native, Daniel Chester French, sculpted the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC while the architect of the Memorial itself was Henry Bacon, who designed Exeter’s Swasey Pavilion. The ‘Exeter Incident’, which took place the year after Dan Brown was born, was one of the most widely publicised and best documented of all UFO sightings. The little town of Exeter is a kind of microcosm of historical picturebook east-coast America.
PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY
Dan Brown is not the first best-selling writer in his family. His father, Richard G Brown, is the author of more than a dozen academic texts, including the best-selling Advanced Mathematics: Precalculus with Discrete Mathematics and Data Analysis, a standard work recommended at schools throughout the United States. Richard Brown has also received the Presidential Award for excellence in mathematics teaching.
Dan Brown and his siblings attended the school where their father taught. The wealthiest private school in the United States, Phillips Exeter Academy has the reputation of being the Eton of America. The roster of famous Exonians includes statesman Daniel Webster; Senator Jay Rockefeller; philanthropist David Rockefeller Jr; John Negroponte, former director of National Intelligence; novelist Gore Vidal; Peter Benchley, author of Jaws; novelist and critic James Agee; beer magnate Joseph Coors; chemicals baron and industrialist Pierre S du Pont; Drew Pearson, the ‘yellow’ journalist; historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr; President Franklin Pierce; Robert Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln; Ulysses S Grant Jr, son of Lincoln’s general; and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
It may say something about Dan Brown’s willingness to question the fundamental assumptions of our society that Phillips Exeter is renowned for using the Harkness method of teaching and has a student-teacher ratio of five to one. Every course at Exeter, whether calculus, literature or existential philosophy, is taught around an oval table, with the idea that learning should come as much from the interchange between students as from the teacher. The school seal, as pictured on p.228, is Masonic in its imagery, and depicts a river, the sun and a beehive.
After finishing at Phillips Exeter, Dan Brown attended Amherst, a venerable Massachusetts liberal arts college, where he took a double major in English and Spanish and showed an interest in music composition and creative writing. He spent his junior year studying the history of art at the University of Seville, and graduated from Amherst in 1986. He would later put his experience of Seville to use when writing his first novel, Digital Fortress.
THE MYSTERIOUS BLYTHE NEWLON
There’s much more to the Dan Brown story, however, than simply looking for parallels between the author and his hero, Robert Langdon. Another element plays a part in the creation of the Langdon novels – in the themes certainly, and possibly in the character of Langdon himself, giving him a certain small-boy sense of secrecy and vulnerability that makes him both sympathetic and attractive to women. This element is Mrs Dan Brown.
The dedication in Inferno is ‘For my parents’, and frankly it’s about time too. Because the dedication in Angels and Demons reads, ‘For Blythe’. In The Da Vinci Code it reads, ‘For Blythe … again. More than ever.’ And in The Lost Symbol it once more reads simply, ‘For Blythe’. ‘My wife has always been a tremendous support system,’ as Dan Brown puts it.
Dan Brown with Blythe Newlon and Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the French culture minister, at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
Mrs Dan Brown was born Blythe Newlon in Palmdale, a high desert town in Los Angeles County, California, in about 1952. That would make her twelve years older than her husband. Both the date and place of birth are uncertain, because almost everything about her is veiled in secrecy – in which role Dan Brown may have introduced her into the first chapter of his Inferno as the woman who appears to Langdon in a vision and tells him time is short, seek and find. ‘The woman reached up and slowly lifted the veil from her face. She was strikingly beautiful, and yet older than Langdon had imagined – in her 60s perhaps, stately and strong, like a timeless statue … Langdon sensed he knew her … trusted her. But how? Why?’
Blythe does not give interviews. Nor has she made public even the barest outlines of her life before 1991, when, as the influential director of artistic development at the National Academy For Songwriters in Los Angeles, she first met Dan Brown. Clutching a portfolio of his songs and a demo CD, he was hoping to hit the big time as a singer-composer.
Brown admits he was a curious sight, describing himself as ‘a fish out of water in Los Angeles’. Teaching Spanish at Beverly Hills Preparatory School by day, and chasing a career in music by night, he lived in a low-rent apartment complex whose hallways overflowed with male models, stand-up comics, aspiring rock stars and drama queens. Blythe, in her late-thirties, was an attractive woman with an established career, and within no time was making things happen.
She took the unusual step for an Academy executive of becoming Brown’s manager, and promoted his debut CD with an announcement to the trade that ‘we fully expect Dan Brown will some day be included in the ranks of our [the Academy’s] most successful members, talents like Billy Joel, Paul Simon and Prince’. Secretly they became lovers. Stardom failed to call, however, and eventually Dan Brown concluded that ‘the world isn’t ready for a pale, balding geek shaking his booty; it’s not a pretty picture’. Meanwhile, though, he and Blythe took a holiday to Tahiti in 1993, and he came across an old copy of Sidney Sheldon
’s The Doomsday Conspiracy on the beach: ‘I read the first page … and then the next … and then the next. Several hours later, I finished the book and thought, “Hey, I can do that.”’
A few months later, Brown took Blythe home to genteel Exeter, where he got a job teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy and in his spare time, with Blythe’s enthusiastic support, began to write. They married in 1997.
THE BIG IDEA
Brown’s childhood love of puzzles, codes and treasure hunts easily transitioned as he grew older into the creation of a fictional world where the hero undertakes a quest through a landscape of secret organisations and hidden truths. All his books deal with secrecy in one way or another, whether in the guise of spy agencies, conspiracy theories, classified technologies or – and this was Dan Brown’s biggest discovery – secret history.
Each time he has approached a new novel, Dan Brown has looked for what he calls the ‘big idea’. And big for Dan Brown gets bigger all the time, reaching out to a cosmic scale. The ideas are preposterous: in Angels and Demons, the Illuminati return after two centuries to destroy the Vatican using anti-matter; in The Da Vinci Code, Jesus and Mary Magdalene establish a church based on the worship of the sacred feminine, their bloodline continuing down to the present day; and in The Lost Symbol, our entire civilisation is called into question over the separation of faith from science since the Renaissance – a denial of the divine potential of mankind.
Not many writers would have the sheer gall to take on subjects of that scale, and neither could anyone expect that the Nicene Creed or Hermes Trismegistus or Thomas Malthus would become the stuff of thrillers read by millions of people around the world. Yet Dan Brown has a gift for making the outrageous and arcane seem natural and accessible. Part of the explanation lies in the sheer pace of his adventures, the short cliff-hanging chapters driving the reader on.
On top of that, though, Dan Brown seems to share the deep-seated doubts and half-realised thoughts of the public mind, often on the most serious and daunting of matters, and he is able to form them into compelling and enjoyable stories. ‘I think my books contain a lot of meat’, he says, ‘but it tastes like dessert somehow.’
DISCOVERING ROBERT LANGDON
Angels and Demons (2000) was the first Robert Langdon novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003) was the second, The Lost Symbol (2009) was the third, and now Inferno (2013) is the fourth. ‘It was a real joy for me to write,’ Brown has said of Angels and Demons, ‘and a breakthrough in terms of finding my own style, although I can only say that with hindsight’. He went on:
I intend to make Robert Langdon my primary character for years to come. His expertise in symbology and iconography affords him the luxury of potentially limitless adventures in exotic locales. It was also a book in which Blythe could be more involved, as she has a great love of art and art history.
That last remark, about Blythe becoming involved, gives a clue to the entire development of the Robert Langdon novels, both their themes and the character of Langdon himself.
Brown worried that his first book, Digital Fortress, with its theme of privacy and surveillance in the new computer era, was too overtly a techno-thriller. With Angels and Demons he changed direction towards conspiracy and art, and this is where Robert Langdon made his debut. Together with Vittoria Vetra, a sensuous and beautiful woman scientist, Langdon attempts to find a canister of anti-matter stolen from CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. A message from the Illuminati, a deeply anti-Christian secret society, says the canister is hidden somewhere in the Vatican where its explosive power can blow the holy city to kingdom come. Also gone missing are the preferiti, the four cardinals shortlisted to succeed the recently deceased pope.
Propelled through the Vatican and round the Renaissance monuments of Bernini in Rome by a series of clues, and assisted by the Camerlengo, the late pope’s closest aide, Langdon and Vittoria search for the cardinals in the hope that they will find the stolen anti-matter. Instead they discover that each of the preferiti has been murdered in a peculiarly symbolic and gruesome way. When Langdon finds the first, his mouth stuffed with earth, he recognises this as a further message from the Illuminati: Earth, Air, Fire, Water are the ancient elements from which all the world is made, meaning that three more victims are intended. Meanwhile a digital clock linked to the anti-matter canister continues its twenty-four hour countdown to Armageddon.
Dan Brown took a wrong turn with Deception Point, a boys’-toys thriller focusing on the intelligence activities of America’s National Reconnaissance Office, which despite having a $10 billion budget and more than 10,000 employees, is unknown to most American taxpayers. One can immediately see how Robert Langdon would have been out of place among its stealth ships and secret aircraft heading for the North Pole.
THE GREAT HIDDEN SECRET
Next, however, Brown had the idea of using a novel to ask ‘what it would mean for Christianity if Jesus were more like us, not God but man?’ The result was The Da Vinci Code. ‘My hope in writing this novel’, he said, ‘was that the story would serve as a catalyst and a springboard for people to discuss the important topics of faith, religion and history.’ With its premise of a great secret hidden within the code – that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and, after his crucifixion, she escaped to France where she gave birth to their child and propagated his bloodline which survives to this day – he touched off a firestorm that swept around the globe. The Da Vinci Code became the world’s best-selling adult novel. Its appeal is three-fold: it’s a top-grade page-turner of a thriller, it packs in more conspiracy per page than almost any other novel you can name, and it has a backdrop of religion, art and secrecy that somehow hits a vein in our supposedly secular modern world.
Dan Brown had researched the material for Digital Fortress and Deception Point entirely on his own, but his wife Blythe became what he has called his ‘research assistant’ on the Robert Langdon novels Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code. ‘This was wonderful’, he said. ‘We were able to work together as husband and wife.’ Blythe did much of the research into some of the most colourful and intriguing themes in The Da Vinci Code, and she was at the very least an indispensable creative force. It was Blythe who suggested her husband introduce the bloodline theory to the book, combining it with suppressed goddess worship and the idea of a Church of Magdalene that never was. At first he was reluctant, he has openly admitted; he thought the idea was too incredible, ‘a step too far’. But eventually she convinced him:
As book and film, The Da Vinci Code conquered the world – here Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou get set for Korea.
Blythe’s female perspective was particularly helpful with The Da Vinci Code, which deals so heavily with concepts like the sacred feminine, goddess worship and the feminine aspect of spirituality. I’m not sure I had ever seen Blythe as passionate about anything as she became for the historical figure of Mary Magdalene, particularly the idea that the Church had unfairly maligned her.
ANCIENT MYSTERIES AND MODERN SCIENCE
The partnership continued a few years later with The Lost Symbol, a book that can also be described as the combined effort of Dan and Blythe Brown. ‘Blythe is helping me with the research for my new novel’, he said. ‘Our studies into the origins of the Christian movement and the ancient mysteries continue to this day.’
Noetic science, intention experiments and the Ancient Mysteries all sound like subjects that Blythe could have drawn her husband into, and on which they would have worked happily together, sharing their interests. Indeed, it is interesting to note how close the sceptical Robert Langdon is drawn to the ideas of Katherine Solomon at the end of the novel, she the older woman, the harbinger of a new way of looking at the world, who sees faith and science as a whole and realises the divinity of mankind.
INTO THE INFERNO
‘This is the darkest novel yet’, Dan Brown says of his Inferno. ‘I want to stress that this is not an activist book. But overpopulation is something that I’m co
ncerned about.’ Which raises the question of whether the world really is overpopulated, and whether the current rate of population increase will continue for much longer – issues that are considered in Chapter Eight of this book. Dan Brown, at any rate, believes so. Taking Dante’s Inferno, with its grotesque images of the human condition, as his launchpad, he explores the scientific and moral issues involved in a new ‘plague’ being unleashed by the scientific genius Bertrand Zobrist, who believes that the only way to save the world from the consequences of rampant overpopulation is to wipe out a large proportion of the human race.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
An Infernal Glossary
Pretty women, lanky men, bearded doctors, handsome academics, exhaling editors, doomsayer lunatics, silver-haired devils and chthonic monsters: Dan Brown’s Inferno runs the gamut of human, posthuman and Transhuman types. Here’s a who’s who and who’s not who to the book’s characters, from Dante Alighieri to Bertrand Zobrist, along with some of the concepts, fabrics and organisations that may have left you bemused as to the Dan Brown web of fact and fiction.