Dan Brown sez: The only thing fictional in “The Da Vinci Code” is the characters and the action that takes place. All of the locations, the paintings, the ancient history, the secret documents, the rituals, all of this is factual.
Limits.
Here is a draft I found of something I wrote back in 2007. ................... I'm going to take this moment to sort of speak aloud. Which is really what blogs are for, am I right? A medium of one-sided discussion. I talk, and you listen. Only three or so people ever comment on my blog, so it really is like a one-way conversation. Google Analytics tells me I average about 11.5 (or so?) unique visitors a day, and about half of those are regular readers, and half are people that randomly get to my blog from a Google search or something. On a weekly basis, I end up having about 50 unique visitors. At any rate, the point is that I get to talk, and say stupid things, and you read, smirking to yourself while drinking your coffee. So, what's this post going to be about, Chris? This post is going to be about how awesome I am. Wait, wait - no I'm being serious. I really am awesome. But there will be some humility in this post also, because the second part of thi...
Comments
The point is that even after his shit has been shown without question to be false, he's still claiming the core part of his book is "true." He's only saying the action, the characters, etc. are fanciful interpretation.
A lot of the more questionable "this shit doesn't really exist" stuff is NOT in the book. It is merely discussed and alluded to.
Granted, there are things he implies are true in the book that have been declared false by pretty much everyone (although once again I imagine he'd say this fits right in with his argument). But you've got to interpret his statement on facts from the proper angle. You've got to figure out what parts of the story count as "characters and actions" and what parts are real, identifiable parts of our world.