The Da Vinci Code: "And so the backlash begins"
Brilliant article from the always-readable Lucy Mangan in The Guardian (contains potential spoilers and just seems to have got more relevant as time has passed.):
A word-of-mouth success
Why are people lining up to rubbish The Da Vinci Code? Simple – it's a bestseller that doesn't know its place
And so the backlash against The Da Vinci Code begins. The main charges against Dan Brown's bestselling thriller appear to be that while the Parisian monuments and buildings he describes do exist, the routes taken by the protagonists between them do not make sense, that Harvard has no professor of symbology (the status ascribed to Brown's hero), and that the ultra-traditional Catholic group Opus Dei does not, in fact, harbour albino assassin monks for deployment against renegade cryptographers and art historians.
I'll give you a moment to recover from the shock of discovering that a thriller writer appears to have picked out elements of real life, used them to lend verisimilitude to his lurid imaginings and distorted geographical and other truths in order to construct a pacy narrative.
The book has also been accused of denigrating Catholicism (although a straw poll of my left-footing family and friends reveals that none of them has suffered any crisis of faith as a result of the tale of the Church's cover-up of Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene) and of providing juicy fodder for conspiracy theorists from sea to shining sea.
It is of course an unfortunate fact of life that if thousands upon thousands read a book written by an established thriller writer, described as a thriller and sold as a thriller, some of them will persist in believing instead that the author is speaking sooth. These people should ideally be herded into the middle of the nearest crop circle and beaten with their own copies of The Bible Code until they see reason, but thanks to a statutory oversight, this is illegal. Read full article here.