Adam Roberts has set himself the task to review the world’s top ten best selling books for some reason best known to himself. At number nine is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Adam manages to find some positive in the book:
No, I’m talking about two broader ideas. And here’s the first: that the world is not as it seems, and that — particularly where high culture, established religion, wealth and power are concerned — you need to dig down beneath the surface appearance of things to get at the truth. Now this is an idea both powerful and dangerous, for applied with too much force to a receptive consciousness it can easily lead to conspiracy-theorising, batshittery and all manner of ‘lizards secretly rule the world’, ‘the moon landings never happened’ and ‘9-11 was an inside job’ idiocy. But it is an important idea nonetheless; and insofar as a large constituency of people on the planet are in the habit of taking things, particularly Established Things like church and government, precisely at face value, it is a progressive one. Of course, this idea is shrouded around in the book with a great deal of chaff and bollocks; but that matters less, I think, than people think it does.
What the second idea is you’ll have to read the rest of his post.
Equaltojake
December 29, 2011 at 12:10 pmNice link, that guy had the most complicated review of lord of the rings I’ve ever seen. I never thought of it as the type of book to attract postmodern style Literary Crititcism.
vic
January 5, 2012 at 7:08 amI thought I recognised the name – vaguely – he posts to the a blog related to RHUL – and there was a lecturer there in the English dept when I was reading English there in the early 90s…
Ofc, for him to be still there after some 18 years or so is probably pushing the identification a bit far.