|
COPYRIGHT 2005 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
People read it on the Tube behind paper wrappers. Distinguished professors have it on their knees during boring seminars. It lingers in disgrace on the shelves of devotees, masked by weightier and more impenetrable tomes. Everyone who has read Dan Brown's bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, makes a point of snootily denouncing it as tosh. I whipped through it in a couple of sittings and found it a pacey and unusually informative thriller. And yet it had some obscure quality that rankled with me deep down.
On a recent trip to France I discovered that Paris is adjusting itself to a new type of tourist, the Codehead. The trail begins, as the book does, in the Denon Wing of the Louvre. An ageing curator is gunned down by a limping albino assassin sent by a secret brotherhood affiliated to the Vatican. The dying man dips a finger in his wounds, draws a pentacle in blood on his chest, and then spreads his limbs in the figure of...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
