“The Da Vinci Code is obviously not a normal novel. It is enormously long and very badly written (“Everyone in the reception area gaped in wonderment at the half-naked albino offering forth a bleeding clergyman”). It is simultaneously bombastic and bafflingly banal, full of uncontrolled, wrong-headed prose, tin-eared dialogue and crazy errors of fact. The characters are drips. And yet I stayed up half the night reading it. So what is the secret?”