Sometimes, dear readers, one’s scruples can
be such a pain. Case in point being my almost obsessive insistence on buying
only ‘original books’; no toilet paper-grade pulp and cyclostyled print for me.
The reason is partly respect for intellectual property rights and partly that
for my own eyesight. The end result, however, is that each book purchase that I
make is a sizeable chunk of my ‘personal extravagances’ budget and therefore
not an unconsidered expense.
I have been burnt more than once, mostly by
the Booker-hopeful sub-continental authors, who seem to have all ghol-ke-peeo’d the formula for success
in that esteemed award: forbidden love in tumultuous times, gratuitous and
affectedly convoluted use of words, a dash of paedophilia thrown in for good
measure, escape from one’s problems only to come back to them later in life to
achieve a measure of closure. Sound familiar? Even good writers, too many to
count, have fallen into the trap.
But it is not only the
hopefully-intellectual books that can prove to be a major waste of the world’s
remaining rainforests, and my remaining hair. The traditional ‘airport books’
(domestic: 150 pages; international: 300 pages) are generally seen as only
marginally more palatable than the food on aircraft. Every so often, however,
there is an exception to the rule. A few years ago, you couldn’t move without
being trodden upon by someone with their nose buried in either “The Da Vinci
Code” or one of the dozens of spinoff books it spawned. People bought,
borrowed, or stole a copy just to see what the fuss was all about, and a
phenomenon was born.
It was a nice enough book – no great need
to engage many grey cells, puzzles that were hard but just about crack-able by
the reader a couple of pages ahead of the protagonists (thus allowing the
reader a warm glow of intellectual superiority), and a good pace to the
narrative. Pretty soon, Dan Brown was the new John Grisham, and the pre release
buzz for his newest books and movie spinoffs was enough to rival even the
bespectacled student wizard himself.
And then, falling victom to the hype, I
spent 900-plus hard-earned rupees on a copy of “The Lost Symbol”. Really, what
was I thinking? I should have just borrowed a copy from some poor shmuck.
That’s two months’ worth of mid-morning makai
I won’t be seeing again in a hurry. What a disappointment. And what a sad
indictment of the general state of humanity that it still topped bestseller
lists worldwide almost a year after publication, when this piece was originally
written.
By all accounts, this book represents a
return to (bad) form for the author. People who have read his other, earlier
books (and I have been burnt by hot milk and so will blow on milkshakes to cool
them down too in the future) tell me they were equally as execrable. I hope to
never find out at first hand.
One must acknowledge however, that the Dan
Browns and Stephanie Meyers’ of this world do perform a valuable service. In
this world of instant gratification and 280 character attention spans, getting
millions of people to actually pick up a fat-ish book and have the will power
to read it through to the end is an achievement in itself. And there is always
the chance that once somebody realises that the Balrog in their own imagination
was much better than that which could ever be shown on celluloid, will be
encouraged to let more creatures that exist on the printed page come alive in
their mind rather than on the flickery screen of a pirated DVD.
The fact that there are not enough dorky
kids out there for whom The Famous Five are close personal friends is a
constant worry for me. There is a whole generation which seems to treat books
as something to be endured at school, and instead bury their nose in a flickering
screen of some description, be it a mobile phone or a gaming device. The
greatest blessing of books such as “The Da Vinci Code” is that it gets people
talking about the book, and as a result places the published word on the top of
peoples’ consciousnesses again, if only for a short time.
In this day and age, anything that gets
people excited about reading cannot be entirely evil, not even a book whose
dénouement is obvious from the moment that the protagonist’s plane begins its
final approach in the first chapter. Although I am concerned about the whole
iPad / Kindle revolution that is sweeping across large parts of Europe and North America; LCD screens look hell-bent on replacing
printed matter, and I am not sure if that is a good thing. I am fairly certain
that a battered old display would never be as welcoming a friend as a tattered
old paperback, dog-ears and all.
Anyone want to buy a hardback first edition
of “The Lost Symbol”? Only one careful owner from new…
Originally published in Dawn, November 2010
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