What Backlash?

The book that doesn’t need any defending is being defended over at the Guardian.

And so the backlash against The Da Vinci Code begins. The main charges against Dan Brown’s bestselling thriller appear to be that while the Parisian monuments and buildings he describes do exist, the routes taken by the protagonists between them do not make sense, that Harvard has no professor of symbology (the status ascribed to Brown’s hero), and that the ultra-traditional Catholic group Opus Dei does not, in fact, harbour albino assassin monks for deployment against renegade cryptographers and art historians.
I’ll give you a moment to recover from the shock of discovering that a thriller writer appears to have picked out elements of real life, used them to lend verisimilitude to his lurid imaginings and distorted geographical and other truths in order to construct a pacy narrative.

How about the charge that it’s just bad writing? Is that literary snobbery, too? Also at the Guardian, Digital Fortress is condensed for your reading relief.