Date: 03.07.09
Journey: Traveling to Brixton on the Victoria Line.
Reader: Looked a bit like Paulie from the Sopranos, but orange, balding and unshaven.

Title: The Da Vinci Code
Author: Dan Brown

Review: I was slithering through London’s vile bowels in my unusually smelly train carriage, waiting to be appropriately excreted in Brixton, when confusion slapped me in the face with its all too familiar clammy palm. I had a profound moment of Deja vu.

Sitting there munching sunflower seeds happily from a paper bag, was a heavy set, middle-aged, perma-tanned man reading The Da Vinci Code! Exuding childlike serenity, presumably caught up in Dan Brown’s neck-break prose, he casually let the sunflower husks fall about his person with not a care in the world.

This Underground spectacle angered me for two reasons. Firstly, just who did he think was going to come and clean up after him? Take some responsibility man! Would you do that in your own home?

The second reason is something less direct and more personal, something that the book represents to me. The deja vu I refer to was not the reader himself; thanks be, but the very act of the book’s appearance on the Underground. I remember when it came out in 2004 the damn thing was everywhere! When it was re-released in paperback giant posters adorned the sides of stations, billboards and bus shelters. Then when the dire film version followed the posters came back with a vengeance and there was no escape from Tom Hanks high forehead and odd hairstyle.

Wikipedia says: “It is a worldwide bestseller that had 60.5 million copies in print by May 2006″ [the release date of the film]. A sizeable chunk of Brazilian Rainforest succumbed to the publishing of that book! 60.5 million copies! That’s almost a copy for each of the entire 2006 UK population! Imagine the nightmarish reality where everybody has their faces buried in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code: on the street, in the pub, at the theatre… That could’ve been the United Kingdom. It doesn’t bear thinking about. I’m sorry I even mentioned it.

The chances are either you’ve read the book or the person next to you has read it… Certainly the person next to them extolling the virtues of an alien anal probe and conjuring conspiracy theories about Michael Jackson has read it! The Truth is out there…

My confusion was namely this: what was this littering Sopranos wannabe doing reading a book that had been so heavily over-exposed for the last half-decade? Surely he must have seen the film, read an article, a review, a damning rebuke, a spin-off, bought the mug, the t-shirt, the collapsible loofah… Surely everyone knows the “secret” by now? How had this man been passed by damn it!? It’s like he was goading me with his nonchalance.

I gritted my teeth as he brushed more sunflower husks into the crevices of his seat and onto the carriage floor.

Now I like to think I’m an individual – in my mind even something of a maverick – but like most people I shop at Tesco, try to pay my bills on time and think someone (else) should really do something about all this horrible poverty and pollution and stuff. But I play by my own rules. Obviously I also play by the various moral, ethical and legal rules that govern our society… and the rules incurring driving and parking violations, you don’t want to mess with them. So as well as those rules, I also play by mine and ‘The Man’ ain’t gonna tell me what to think… or read!

I remember a time in Borders where I was made to pay for a casual comment to a friend. Something along the lines of: “Have you read that Harry Potter thing? Everybody keeps going on about it. Isn’t it a kids book?” As my friend mumbled she hadn’t, a bespectacled girl made a beeline for me with the purpose of an exercet missile.

“It’s not a kids book, you should read it, it’s really good…etc… etc… bloody etc…”

I found myself subjected to a sickening display of public love of Potter or PLOP, to give it an appropriate acronym. The girl was like an aggressive drug dealer pushing the literary Potter Pill, and I wasn’t buying. In fact so demented these Potter-mouths seemed to me, that I actively set out to avoid the books altogether. Subsequently there have been arguments to try and get me to jump on Harry’s bandwagon including a heated exchange about Quidditch. I helpfully informed one child that any team game that can be won outright by catching a secondary ball, regardless of goals scored, time played, spells cast, or whatever, was clearly stupid. The kid called me a “mugglef*ck” and went off to seek the solace of his Xbox. He knew I was right.

I digress. Seeing Paulie painstakingly reading Brown’s novel, brought all that Potter hostility back in that The Da Vinci Code was also a book that was discussed far beyond it’s worth; that it utterly saturated popular culture and that I had endless amounts of people telling me: “You have to read it!”

In short: I got sick of hearing about it.

I wondered how the Da Vinci Boat had sailed Paulie by. Maybe he’d been putting reading it off for a while or… A shudder went through me as the horrific notion that he was re-reading it crossed my mind. I shuffled closer to investigate.

The book looked fairly new and the last third was pristine and unruffled. It wasn’t being re-read. However, like the story itself, the book had a surprise in store: it was written in Spanish. Mi Dios! It was actually “El Codigo Da Vinci.” Paulie suddenly became Paulo and I realized his orange hue was not the result of hours on a low quality sun bed in Speedos.

It suddenly seemed strangely amusing and I sniggered at the thought of Senor Robert tearing around gay Paris looking for clues. Paulo’s head snapped up and, no longer childlike, he gave me a look like he’d happily take me on a one way fishing trip. Thankfully the train stuttered to a halt and I hurried off into the smoldering Brixton melee.

So this is where I confess. I have watched two Harry Potter films. Out of sequence. I didn’t fully get what was happening, but I watched them nonetheless. I have also read “The Da Vinci Code”. I quite enjoyed it too. Sorry. I feel a bit guilty about it all now… Sorry Paulie/Paulo.

Thanks for reading,

Russ

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