The DaVinci Code had just come out when I started working at Borders; after a month of customers asking my opinion, I decided it was time to break down and read it. The theology was terrible though the visceral reaction it elicited in me had far more to do with the fact that it was written at the reading level of, oh, an eight year old.
Another of Brown’s books, Angels & Demons, is coming to a movie theatre near you this summer. Andrew Leigh has some beautiful thoughts on the book/film (and Brown). Here are a few excerpts:
Reading Angels and Demons, I wasn’t so much struck by the work’s bigotry as by how badly it was written. The cliched style is the literary equivalent of cotton candy. And for someone with so much animus toward religion, Brown employs the deus ex machina more frequently than the Old Testament…
Imagine that someone made a film that portrayed Steven Spielberg as a closet anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Movie fans would be justifiably outraged. But Dan Brown wrote a book (soon to be a movie!) identifying another great artistic virtuoso, Bernini, as a secret atheist who hated the Catholic Church. In reality, though, Bernini was a devout Catholic who went to mass every day and pursued the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, which include up to five hours of daily silent meditation.
