I had opportunity to peruse an old Franklin W. Dixon Hardy Boys story recently, THE YELLOW FEATHER MYSTERY. As a child, I devoured these stories, speeding through the breathless prose as Frank and Joe fell into mystery and adventure seemingly on every single page.

They don’t age gracefully, the Hardy Boys. Considering the wealth of brilliant children’s fiction that is available, The Hardy Boys are, sadly, bland and boring, written with a wretched style that gives the word `style’ a bad name. It’s peculiar how one’s priceless childhood memories invariably disappoint when filtered through the prism of years of experience.

However, reliving the glory years of Mr. Hardy’s sons brought me new insight into the travesty that is Dan Brown’s THE DA VINCI CODE; it is a Hardy Boys adventure, a poorly-written serial novel right down to the ridiculous plot twists, wet tissue paper-thin characters, and easily spotted villains. Dan Brown is the new Franklin W. Dixon, and considering how low on the authorial totem pole that is, it is not a position one should brag about.

For those who have existed in a cavern for the past two years, THE DA VINCI CODE revolves itself around the murder of a curator of the Louvre, and a mystifying message he left scrawled in his own blood. Promptly summoned to the scene is Robert Langdon, intrepid world-famous cryptologist (!) who, with the help of a spunky policewoman (shades of Nancy Drew), becomes embroiled in a mystery so convoluted, wacky, and frankly utterly ludicrous, Joe and Frank would be embarrassed to have their names ascribed to its solution.

The quandary with DA VINCI is not the elements of the plot, a mishmash of conspiracy theories and religious arcana that many theologians and scholars have debated to death. Suffice to say that Dan Brown comes across as an undiscerning man who believes absolutely everything he reads on the Internet.

No, the problem is not the plot. To paraphrase film critic Roger Ebert, it is not the story one tells, but how one goes about telling it. To pull two examples from a hat: Stephen King’s THE SHINING is laughable on the face of it, yet King makes it work, expertly filtering an affecting subtext about the destruction of the family unit through alcoholism into a haunted house scenario. Ernest Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES is a simple tale of unlikable people behaving atrociously throughout Europe, yet by the end you have learned so much more about the human condition than you ever thought possible.

Unfortunately, Brown is not King, nor Hemingway; he’s not up to the low standards of a Dean Koontz , Brian Lumley, or Tom Clancy. He’s not even a Richard Marchinko. Instead, he’s a hack on the level of the atrocious Tim LaHaye, an abysmal storyteller who has taken every single pathetic element of a Hardy Boys series novel, applied a few seven-dollar words and obscenities, and claimed the style as his own. He is even so shameless as to beat Joe and Frank in the use! of! exclamation! points!

What is most appalling about DA VINCI is the fact that it is page for page, character for character, almost word for word identical to the last three novels he’s unleashed on an innocent public. Every novel, from DIGITAL FORTRESS on, follows the same blueprint: someone dies; someone’s called in; everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off while an evil overlord pulls all the strings.

Brown writes like his intended audience is fourteen-year-old boys on a sugar bender, needing a thrilling escapade every three pages lest the ADD kick in. He writes, in other words, like all the authors who wrote under the Franklin W. Dixon pseudonyms. And when one considers how many top-notch authors there are who have covered the same material with wit, originality, and breathtaking literary grace, Brown’s success is appalling.

Consider Arturo-Perez Reverte’s THE CLUB DUMAS. Consider Umberto Eco’s THE NAME OF THE ROSE. Both have intricate plotlines involving religious conspiracies and lost tomes. Both are superlative examples of the conspiracy genre. In fact, anything by Perez-Reverte fits the bill.

Brown is undeserving of his success, and THE DA VINCI CODE is wretched literature, by any standard. He has written a novel that makes the reader feel smart, all the while duping them with a hackneyed plot that reads like warmed-over Hardy Boys. Let us all hope that, with all his millions, he spends fifty dollars on a mail-order novel-writing course. It could not possibly come out any worse.

“To stop being a tourist, sometimes all you have to do is start standing still.”
Canadian author Taras Grescoe understands the impulse to travel. A “non-proselytizing secular humanist,” he has spent his life hopping continents, seeking increasingly rare unspoiled pools of exotic culture so popular among travel writers. His first effort, Sacre Blues, irreverently explored the Quebec landscape and citizenry of modern times.

However, in The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists, Grescoe stays resolutely on the beaten path, examining the impact mass tourism imposes upon the planet. Over nine months, he travels a Eurasian “tourist rut,” ranging from Land’s End in Spain to China’s End of the Earth. Along the way, he strives to comprehend his inability to stay still.

A born storyteller, Grescoe is a disarming presence, cynical and self-effacing along the lines of Paul Quarington’s Galapagos reminiscence The Boy on the Back of the Turtle. He is candid about his faults, including being wildly superstitious and having a past drug problem. His flaws serve to heighten the tale, as the trek begins to take its toll on both his beliefs and his sobriety.

Enjoying the journey at first, Grescoe wryly examines the surreality of group tours. The forced infantilization of a bus tour threatens to drive him crazy, while a low-key cruise is more pleasurable than expected, as “the combination of self-indulgent leisure and directed movement was the perfect formation of work-ethic sybaritism, like having sex in the afternoon while your clothes tumble-dry in the basement.”

Intermingled amid fascinating asides on the origins of religious pilgrimages, guidebooks, and all-inclusive resorts, a bizarre assortment of excursionists make themselves known. Shirley MacLaine devotees line the 850-kilometre trek of Spain’s Camino. Extreme athletes race up the Matterhorn. “Lager louts” vomit throughout the Mediterranean, while disenfranchised “trustafarians” trek through Asia armed with copies of Alex Garland’s The Beach.

As Grescoe follows the “post-hippie banana-pancake route,” the book’s sardonic atmosphere shifts to despair, matching his increasing frustration with tourist locations consisting of “the same commercialized shuck.” Sightseers become abusive, even violent, “finding themselves among the kinds of people they jostle with for standing room on the subway back home.”

By the end, Grescoe’s narrative expands beyond mere comic commentary a la Bill Bryson, evolving into a travel version of Rachel Carson’s environmental masterpiece Silent Spring. Cultures become systematically sterilized and packaged for mass consumption, and the concept of `elsewhere’ grows increasingly irrelevant. Nearing journey’s end, he sees “the dispossessed being ushered from their land for failing to serve up a pleasing simulacrum of their culture,” as Chinese soldiers remove locals from a tourist area.

Grescoe does not condemn tourism out of hand. It is bulk tourism’s lack of connection with the world that inevitably befouls other cultures. As package tourists slavishly obey their Lonely Planet guides, local citizenry is pushed to the fringes, alienated within their own country, and plunged into urban slums.

Grescoe’s hopeful cure? Slow down. Travel is fine when the ultimate aim is appreciation, rather than recreation. A tourist becomes a traveller only when bonds are formed and maintained. Grescoe’s memoir, an important book, admits “it is a good thing to know how to use a guidebook. It’s better, though, to know when to put it down.”

There is an unwritten axiom that modern Christian fiction – that is, fiction written and marketed as being by Christians, for Christians, about Christians – is almost invariably poor.
It wasn’t always this way. C.S. Lexis, perhaps the last truly great `Christian’ writer, penned works that pushed the boundaries of what literature could be. With The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and numerous others, Lewis proved that fiction explicitly marketed from the Christian angle could be thought-provoking, engaging, and brilliant.

Lately, that has not been the case. Christian fiction has been dumbed down into tales of evangelical zeal, stories designed solely as propaganda. This is most obviously exemplified by the Left Behind cycle, an undeniably popular fundamentalist post-apocalyptic series of books that are also, all theological arguments aside and based solely on the basic tenets of good story-telling, simply god-awful (pun definitely intended).

Unfortunately, Manitoba writer Paul H. Boge’s novel The Chicago Healer will not do much to dispel this pattern.

The winner of a Castle Quay Books award for Best New Canadian Author, The Chicago Healer centres on Lucas Stephens, a pharmaceutical executive who discovers, after a brutal tenure in a Chinese penitentiary, that he has been given the gift of healing. Quickly becoming a celebrity, he earns at first the contempt, then the wrath of his former employer, as his healings quickly begin to threaten the company’s profit margin.

There’s no denying Boge’s earnestness as a writer. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Boge commits one of the cardinal sins an author can commit: the book is boring. His prose is turgid and uninspired, a dreary and often inept display of an amateur writer with a story to tell, but without the tools to tell it.

The shame of it is, the story itself is very good, if unoriginal. Author Elmore Leonard took time away from his crime-fiction duties many years ago to release Touch, a novel with the same basic premise and themes. The chief difference being, Leonard knows how to tell a story. Where Touch succeeds in its discussion of the theological implications of power and the corruption of the soul, The Chicago Healer fails, mainly due to uninteresting characterizations, flat plotting, and trite moralizations.

There is good literature on these themes and others to be found, but from outside the limited sphere of strictly `Christian entertainment.’ Canadian author Nino Ricci, Jim Crace, and Jose Saramonge have each written absorbing and philosophically involving accounts of the life of Christ. James Morrow has written several theologically fascinating satires in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Stephen King covers many Christian themes in his horror novels.

The Chicago Healer is not the worst thing ever written, it simply isn’t very good. It is the literary equivalent of unflavoured yoghurt; you can eat it, and keep it down, understanding that it’s probably good for you. But afterward, it leaves a sour taste in your mouth, and you end up wishing you had something else to eat instead.

Man. Wow. This was released in theatres? Wow.

Sheesh, I must have been high to watch this all the way through. Candy was a comedy legend, but he had a real knack of appearing in losers.

One of the worst films I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched WHO’S HARRY CRUMB.