Coded Messages

Dan Brown should never again be allowed to touch a computer, typewriter, pencil or quill pen. To say that he is an incompetent, lazy, hack merely avoids the underlying truth that he is a ludicrously poor writer who, if there were any literary justice in the world, would be editing pull-quotes for third-rate skin mags or compiling ingredients lists for dog food tins.

Of course he has a shed-load of best-selling novels and insulates his house with wads of hundred dollar bills while I toil away in middle management and write a blog that, at last count, four people read so anything that I might say probably sounds like sour grapes.

But really, honestly, The Da Vinci Code is crap. The sentence structure is bordering on the absurdly simplistic, the language is juvenile and trite; just to complete the hat-trick, the entire book is so littered with factual errors and inaccuracies that it makes the car chase in Bullitt look like a model of continuity.

A year ago I went out and bought the damn thing just to see what all the fuss was about; I am still wondering. I tend to devour books but The Da Vinci Code was like biting into the foam on a latte. It took me two days to read because every twenty minutes or so I was forced to throw it aside and allow my rising bile to settle.

That the move received a mountain of scorn from reviewers and plummeted quickly off the charts brings a bit of warmth to my cold and cynical heart. However the fact that anyone anywhere would, without the assistance of Mr. 9mm against the temple, voluntarily queue up to witness this tripe is something that the rational mind can only boggle at. Still, people have shown that they will willingly pay money to see Ben Affleck nose dive into whatever mound of rancid shit he is appearing in this week so bad taste is, thankfully for this blog, alive and well.