Sam read with interest this week of the outrage expressed by my old mate the Archbishop of Genoa about Dan Brown’s phenomenal best-seller, The Da Vinci Code.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone – for it is he – chaired a symposium intended to counter what he called “the absurd and outrageous manipulations” of Brown’s book, which has reportedly sold 18 million copies in 44 countries over the last two years. As you might just have heard, the story concerns code-breakers on the trail of the Holy Grail, in this case not a chalice but yer actual human bloodline, traceable back to the alleged offspring of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.

Bertone is not impressed. “That book is all over the place, you find it everywhere,” he told an Italian newspaper. “There’s a very real risk that many people who read it will take its fabrications for real.”
When Sam read these words, he was immediately struck by the memory of something our man McCann once said in response to comments made by Cardinal Cathal Daly. The Whislter Daly had been dissing so-called religious cults and, if memory serves, McCann responded along the lines of: “This from a man who, on a daily basis, purports to transform quantities of bread and water into the body and blood of a man who allegedly lived two thousand years ago in the Middle East – I think he has a cheek.”
Lovely hurling.
The first thing to say about Dan Brown’s book is that it’s a pile of crap. Sam has actually read the damn thing and even stuck with it to the end, in the hope that the daft plot, one-dimensional characters and lame dialogue might be redeemed by some startlingly ingenious denouement. Like, you know, the actual discovery of the thing the quest is supposed to be all about – someone in the present day catering trade, say, who’s bafflingly prodigious in the loaves and fishes department.
But no. Just to save the five people on the planet who haven’t heard of the Da Vinci Code the bother of checking it out, let me reveal that the climax is such an anti-climax that I’ll be buggered if I can remember it at all. Suffice to say, that nobody turns up claiming rights to an old carpentry business.
Not that this has prevented all kinds of lame brains touting the book around religious sites in Paris and elsewhere, as though it were a reliable A-Z of historical truth. And it’s this phenomenon which has driven old Bertone ‘round the twist.

Preposterous Best-seller

And, indeed, you’d have some sympathy for the Archbishop but for two salient points. Firstly, although he has deliberately muddied the waters by inserting bits of historical fact along with more dubious allegations into his narrative, Brown has never made any claim other than that his book should be stocked on the shelves marked ‘Fiction’.
Secondly – and here’s where The Whistler Daly comes in – Bertone’s concern that “many people who read it will take its fabrications for real” is a breathtakingly arrogant and hypocritical statement on the part of a man who presumably places considerable store in that even more popular and preposterous best- seller, The Bible.
Here, after all is a book in which – just to pick a few random examples – people rise from the dead, a virgin gives birth, a woman is turned into a pillar of salt, creatures with wings are forever turning up at the front door with urgent messages, and when one man is told by a disembodied voice to cut off his foreskin, he willingly complies. As you would.
Incidentally, although Bertone wouldn’t perhaps want to dwell on this, Sam’s own extensive theological studies point to the foreskin issue as the critical fork in the road at which Christianity and Judaism went their separate ways.
Hence that old but good gag about Peter telling his flock: “Right, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you can keep your foreskins. The bad news is that you’ll never be allowed touch them for as long as you live.”

Modern Drunkard

So, as your Literary Editor as well as your Theological Correspondent, Sam’s advice this week is to give both The Da Vinci Code and The Bible the widest possible berth and instead subscribe to a fine new magazine called Modern Drunkard.
The editor and publisher Frank Kelly Rich recently held a press conference in Denver about the origins of his glossy, upmarket bi-monthly publication which was launched in 1996 and now has a circulation of 50,000.
“I’ve always seen alcohol as a boon to mankind,” said Rich, chasing a gin and tonic with whiskey as he spoke, “and regard drunks as an oppressed minority, so I wanted to begin a publication aimed specifically at them. I get letters of support all the time, not just from drinkers but even from people in Alcoholics Anonymous who say they like to read it because it reminds them of what life was like when they used to drink.
“Some of our most accomplished people have been drinkers,” he went on. “Look at Hemingway. He was a great literary drunk. Most teetotallers would trade their lives for his in a second.
“That’s the end of the press conference,” Rich concluded. “I am too drunk to think straight.”
Sam is indebted to Private Eye for bringing us this report courtesy of their always excellent newspaper clippings column, Funny Old World.
And I also liked their illustration: a front-page splash attributed to Ernest Hemingway and entitled ‘A Farewell To Legs’.