Idling away watching Tony Robinson ping from academic to academic and from church to church in his quest for the holy grail, or as that cash-in title has it The Real Da Vinci Code. I'm reading The Da Vinci Code at the moment (as predicted by Mark Lawson on Radio 4 - you or someone you know will receive a copy of The Da Vinci Code for Christmas), and it's bollocks frankly.

The book rips along, no doubt about that, but it's dreadful, really, really dreadful. The constant cliffhangers are heavy-handed, there's a reliance on extended flashbacks (each invariably introduced by He thought back again to that night ...), the plot (300 pages in, so far) is really pretty thin (and, to me at least, a bit familiar). Dan Brown makes his living as a professor of English, so he's obviously read a few books. He's unable to translate that knowledge into good writing of his own though. His characters, for example, are pretty flat, defined by adjectives (The reknowned curator Jacques Sauniere - the prologue's opening words) rather than dialogue or action. He states, he doesn't reveal.

The book actually begins with a page headed FACT with a few lines about Da Vinci and about Opus Dei. Throughout, there are little digressions on Da Vinci, the golden mean, the Knights Templar, and so on. No doubt I'll get a little potted history of the Cathar heresy, Carcassonne and Rennes-le-Chateau before too long. That stuff's real it hints, maybe the rest is too. It's a really cheesy device to try and give the story more weight that it really has. Precisely the kind of device beloved of the pulp authors of the 20s and 30s, authors who would no doubt recognise Dan Brown as one of their own. Except we won't be reading Dan Brown in 70 years time, but we will still be reading Tarzan and Conan. No, we will.

Should you really want to read a big fat novel packed to the gunwhales with graily, templary, rosicrusiany, masony, full-on-high-fibre semiotics stuff then run, don't walk, to Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It's bloody marvellous.