In today's New York Times, A.O. Scott has a wonderful review of The Da Vinci Code which is described as "Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence". The review features a number of observations that you don't read every day, for example "movies ... rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python."
In short, the movie gets panned. Not surprising really. I thought the book was overated, pseudo-historical, chewing gum for the brain.
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I hated the book. It was Umberto Eco Lite. Eco has a much better grasp of both irony and the historical facts - he really likes his alchemists and Kabbalists. Brown seems to have the historical sense of a political journalist.
I agree about Eco. I tell anyone who raves to me about Brown's book to read Foucault's Pendulum (and indeed The Name of the Rose, which is one of my favorite books).
Yes indeed. Reminds me that I need to read The Name of the Rose again; it's been far too long.
What I thought was a shame about The Da Vinci Code was that a competent author probably could have made a halfway decent thriller out of the concepts and characters, but Brown's writing is just painful.
I had a number of problems with this book, mostly based on its lack of originality, and the fact it is not that well written.
And a conspiration with a grand total of three members, from which one is a traitor, sounds somewhat, well, cheap...