Chapter 7

My favourite fiction writer, for all his faults, is Evelyn Waugh. His greatest gift was for dialogue, and he was one of the first novelists to exploit the phenomenon of the telephone; with a page of speech, often without speech tags or even any explicit indication of who was talking, he could express the deepest weaknesses of his characters. (David Lodge discusses this technique in depth in his brilliant collection of essays The Art of Fiction, which should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in how novels work.)

Waugh, I think it's fair to say, would not have included the following sentence in one of his phone conversations: "I'm sorry, you say this visiting Opus Dei numerary cannot wait until morning?" It's like one of those heavy-handed Hollywood epics that include explanatory lines like "But Your Majesty, if you execute your cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, won't you be just as bad as your father, Henry VIII, when he beheaded your mother, Anne Boleyn?" And, before anyone says it, yes, I know Shakespeare sometimes does the same thing, and it's horrible when he does it as well.

That aside, I'm quite impressed by the illusion of breathless pace that Brown creates. It's partly the short chapters, partly the hopping between locations. When you stop and consider, he's given over three pages to an old lady getting out of bed, although he did pack it out with a little detour into the murky world of Vatican politics.

Was he being paid by the word, I wonder?

I'm taking a bit more time off for good behaviour. Back Thursday, if I'm not kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge. In the meantime, RIP Robert Anton Wilson. There was someone who knew the secret of apeshit conspiracy theories: make them really, really silly. I think Brown's sort of nudging in that direction, but he doesn't seem to be aware of it. Wilson could sneeze out 23 fresh conspiracies a day, and never lose his knowing wink.

And that sort of leads to today's homework. The various obits of RAW reminded me that the wonderful Ken Campbell (the best Dr Who we never had?) who adapted and staged the Illuminatus! trilogy in the 1970s, and I started to think that TDVC would have been considerably more entertaining if Langdon had been modelled on Campbell rather than any uneasy fusion of Indiana Jones, Brown himself and Sister Wendy Beckett. So that's your task - create your fantasy Da Vinci adaptation - stage, movie, opera, whatever - and give details of dream cast, director, writer, music, special effects and so on.