The Da Vinci Code

As romans de aeroport go, this is quite literate. As literature, it's tosh. Built around the legends and conspiracy theories surrounding the knights templar and the holy grail, this is a fast paced piece of slick American thriller writing which toys with having an underlying purpose.

The book is all stock pieces from the instant bestseller construction kit. There's the famous places. The Louvre, Westminster Abbey, Roslin Chapel. There's the brands. The Smart Car, the stretch Jaguar, the Range Rover, the Hawker 731 executive jet (with twin Garrett TFE-731 engines, I kid you not). There's the cardboard-cutout stock characters. The handsome, famous, knowledgable, American professor. The cool, beautiful, naive French princess. The gruff, astute, rule-bending, infallible police inspector. The curiously disfigured (in this case albino) minor villain. The enormously wealthy eccentric English aristocrat. And finally, there's the plot twists. The man murdered, apparently accusing the hero of the crime. The villain turning out - what a surprise! - to be one of the main players. And so on, and so forth. Put them in a chrome cocktail shaker (not a silver one, the intended audience can't tell the difference), shake vigorously for five minutes, and pour out your manuscript.

If ever a book screamed out 'make me a movie' it's this one. The locations are opulent. The pace is frenetic. The set pieces are highly cinematic. Frankly, I hope a film is made of it. It will probably be a good film. It's a dreadful book.

Why dreadful? At it's core this is a puzzle plot, similar to, inter alia, Conan Doyle's 'The Dancing Men'. The trick with a puzzle plot is to make the puzzles simple enough for the reader to figure them out, but complex enough to flatter the reader that it was hard to figure them out. Perhaps for the audience it's written for - Americans with the attention span of a gnat and the depth of cultural knowledge of a sea cucumber - it works. But honestly... There's a piece of plain English mirror writing, and we're supposed to believe that a group comprising cryptanalyst, a professor of religious iconography, and a specialist historian with wide knowledge of ancient languages and secret codes, find this hard to recognise. Later the same group study the tomb of a man about whom exactly one story is known to every schoolchild in the western world, and - with very explicit clue in hand - they take half an hour to remember that story.

There's a horrible lack of detail research throughout the book. So many things are just wrong. Metropolitan police officers routinely entering rooms with guns drawn, for example, or introducing themselves on the phone as 'the London Police'; British customs officers being so uniformly corrupt that it's possible confidently to plan to bribe whoever happens to be on duty that night; and so on. And the author has clearly never been to Roslin.

Finally, there's a gaping literary void at the end of the book. The author clearly knew what the required ending was, but he also knew it wouldn't suit his audience; that they wouldn't understand it. So the ending the that the plot cries out for is almost there in the last chapter - the hero actually has his hand on the real Holy Grail, the grail that everything in the plot points to; but instead of going in (as clearly he could), he flies back to Paris, and later works out an altogether different place where what he thinks is the grail might be, consistent with the clues. But this ending misunderstands the metaphysical nature of the grail (which has been spelled out pretty clearly throughout the plot), and, as the hero is supposed to be a world expert at symbols, he wouldn't do this. So either the author lost confidence in what he was doing at the end, or else he allowed his editor to bully him into changing the ending.

[Oh, and, no, I don't think the Grail 'is' in Roslin Chapel; I don't think it's supposed to be kept there or hidden there. But I think the Grail was in Roslin Chapel at the same time as the hero was. If you don't agree, reread the book].