The Dan Brown Craze

Book excerpt: Since the Chinese translation of The Da Vinci Code was released in China in 2004, the “Dan Brown Craze” has swept across the country. All of Brown’s novels have subsequently been translated into Chinese and sold millions of copies. No living foreign writer has generated so much media coverage and scholarship in China within such a short period of time; not even Toni Morrison or J.K. Rowling. Brown’s rendering of dichotomies, such as science and religion, humanity and divinity, good and evil, and liberty and privacy, resonates well with his Chinese readers because they feel that these issues are no longer irrelevant to them. They see an urgent need for a revision, if not an entire redefinition, of their existing beliefs and values. This book examines the plot, characterization, themes, setting, codes, knowledge, institutions, and techniques in his novels, and delivers a careful textual analysis, a selective dissemination of relevant information on different subjects, and a perceptive comparison between Brown and other Chinese and Western writers. As such, it shows how his thrillers have been appreciated and studied in China, and what kinds of discoveries, challenges, controversies, and insights have surfaced in the Chinese appreciation of Brown’s novels. Furthermore, the book explores why the “Dan Brown Craze” has lasted this long and exerted a broad and far-reaching impact upon the reading, writing, studying, translating, publishing, and marketing of fiction in China.