Fictional Loans

It should be a great relieve to all fiction readers and writers that the courts in Britain struck down the claim against the author and publisher of The Da Vinci Code. If this claim were valid, no work of fiction can be written again unless writers become illiterate and not read anything. One of the most important things that fiction writers do is to absorb from their surroundings and ideas they counter to enrich their works and thus indirectly enrich the readers’ lives. Shakespeare, for example, borrowed directly from other works of fiction and accounts and theories of people of the past and his time. If writers were not allowed to do what Dan Brown did with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s work, there would be no Shakespeare, no Christopher Marlow and no Edmund Spenser. In other words, there would be no English language as we know it. A profession historian would understand this and appreciate the fruit of their works—the friction based on their works. Baigent and Leigh are, however, not so much historians but prospectors of telltales; and as such they first claim what they said to be historical facts and then claim ownership of these fact. They cannot have it both ways.