Strange Truth

Strange Truth

By Maurice Malanes

In one of our English subjects in college, our teacher assigned us to write an essay around the topic “truth is stranger than fiction.” I don’t remember articulating well the topic, which at that time was quite unclear to me. But I remember having said that fiction could be better understood than all the treatises that sought to explain the truth.

This brings us to a now controversial work of fiction – The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which has been made into a movie. The former public school teacher author himself stresses that his book is fiction. The only things he claims to be factual are “the Priory of Sion, a secret society founded in 1099; the Opus Dei, a deeply devout Catholic sect that has just built a US$47 million national headquarters at 243 Lexington Ave., New York; and all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals.”

Other than these, the rest of the book is fiction. This means, or we assume, that the rest of the book is a product of the author’s imagination.

But why has the book created so much controversy and reaction from various sectors? Why do such groups like the Philippine Alliance Against Pornography want President Arroyo to ban the film version of the novel? These groups have their reasons. One is the novel’s claim that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and even had children with her, including the Merovingian kings of France. Another is about the fabled Holy Grail, which, the novel says, was actually Magdalene, not the chalice used in the Last Supper, and that Magdalene’s womb served as the “chalice” from which the royal blood of Jesus flowed forth in posterity.

All these, says Brown, is fiction. But why have the book and its film version invited so intense reactions that some want to suppress the screening of the film later this month?

I like the cool reaction of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. The Bishops Conference spokesperson Monsignor Pedro Quitorio said: “If the faith of the people is strong, it would not be destroyed by one novel. Both the book and the movie are presented the way it should be – a fiction – so the people must not be afraid.”

To Quitorio, the more people, be they critics or supporters, talk about the book and the movie, the more the book and movie would sell.

But if fiction, like any other art, imitates life, Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” reflects one fact of life – that life itself, as we know it, still has a lot of mysteries, which we must keep on discovering as we keep on learning. In the process, we can discover and learn new truths, thereby further strengthening our faith rather than undermining it as some would fear. That’s one of the strengths of fiction – to lead us to the truth.

That’s one reason why we prefer to read fiction rather than some voluminous jargon-laden documents of the UN or some other government bureaucracy, which lull us to sleep after a couple of pages. Novels, on the other hand, can keep us awake and we keep on reading and before we know it the roosters are already crowing after we have been reading for six straight hours after 10 in the evening.

And fiction can move us to tears or can make us laugh as we are held in suspense for every twist and irony along the way. One novel that was so powerful it made me cry and laugh and think was “Kite Runner,” the first novel of Afghan author Khaled Hosseini. As it tells about love, honor, guilt, fear and redemption, the novel also tells about the contemporary history of Afghanistan.

And that’s the strange thing about fiction. Through fiction, we can appreciate better all great themes of life – be it faith, love, justice, freedom, hope, and salvation. These themes come to life as they are acted by both the protagonists and antagonists in a story of fiction.

Small wonder the story-telling techniques of fiction are being adopted now by journalism.