The first reviews of The DaVinci Code movie are out, and soon everyone will weigh in on the merits (or lack thereof) of the film.
I'm predicting that the smug, literary types who have lambasted the novel for the past few years will grin and say, "The novel's is so bad that even Tom Hanks and Ron Howard couldn't make a blockbuster out of it." As if the quality of a novel had any relation to the quality of the adaptation of it to a different medium. Sure, there's some correlation (Gone with the Wind and The Godfather come to mind) but it's not absolute.
I thought the novel was good; I did not stop to think about the nitty gritty details, mainly because the book is a page turner, and I read it in two days. One thing I liked was that it did cause me to wonder about the pictures and things talked about. So I went to the net and looked up all the paintings that they talked about, found pictures of the places they visited. Very interesting stuff. Now you can buy the illustrated version of the novel and not have to put the book down to fire up Google.
What about all the misconstrued "facts" in the book? Doesn't bother me one bit. It's a novel. A novelist can put whatever he wants between the covers of his book. Wait, let me qualify that, in light of the Opal Metha plagiarism scandal. A novelist can put almost anything in his book. When I read a novel, I know it's a novel, and I know that no matter how they're presented, the "facts" are the author's version of the "facts."
Remember the movie Fargo? That was, according to the opening credits, "a true story." Only it wasn't.
The Cohen brothers added some false verisimilitude to their story.
