Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown's at it again: another book that will have to do with religion and mysteries surrounding it, problems to be solved and, of course, in writing the book, a heap of money to be made.
Best of luck to him I say.
Many others seem to resent his success pointing to his dreadful style. Not literature, old boy.
John Humphreys of Radio 4's Today fame had a go at him: "the literary equivalent of painting by numbers by an artist who can't even stay within the lines." And, naturally, Salmon Rushdie has put his two well shod boots in: "a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."
I liked "The Da Vinci" code. But there, I'm someone who finds it difficult to get through two or three pages of any Ian Macewan novel.
What the novel has got, if it is without literary distinction or even merit at all, is speed; it's a real page-turner. And with page-turners you don't, in a sense, actually read them - you speed read them. You're not interested in and certainly not aware of any literary content - only the speed of the action is what you're after.
Probably the trouble with it getting such a bad press is that it is pretentious, or seems so: maybe Dan Brown wants to be taken seriously as a novelist and so the story is over complex, with people trying to solve problems which, because of their nature (religious stuff), have the veneer of something to be taken seriously.
I enjoyed the film too (except for the part with Ian Macellan in).
So here's looking forward to the new novel and, later no doubt, the 700 million dollar grossing film. With Tom Hanks.