The story follows a young Harvard academic called Robert Langdon. The police summon him to the Louvre, where a famous curator has been murdered. I don’t go quite as far as “arse-gravy”. In fact, I thought it was a fantastic thriller. Nevertheless, accusations of inaccuracies are very well-founded. Several authors have denounced it as sub-par literature, with Stephen Fry charmingly describing it as “arse-gravy of the worst kind”. Innumerable historians have debunked its plot inaccuracies. This international bestseller is as controversial as it is popular. In 2004, the Lebanese government banned the book for religious blasphemy.
Indeed, my reaction to any literary controversy is to write about it in The Student.Īrmed with that philosophy, I read Dan Brown’s thriller The Da Vinci Code over the holidays. In the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “my first instinct upon hearing that a book has been banned is to seek it out and read it.” I agree.
