Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
November 15th 2006 06:07
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
After trashing Republicans in his first two novels, Dan Brown turned to another pet target, the Catholic church in his Angels and Demons, the novel which originally introduced his Harvard symbologist hero Robert Langdon. Brown would not become famous until his second Robert Langdon novel The Da Vinci Code became an international blockbuster but looking back it is hard to argue that Angels and Demons is the better novel of the two and his best novel to date.
In the opening scenes, Brown plugs like hell for CERN and probbaly he felt that it was a bit too much, so he plugs a little more in a fatuous prologue. Anyway, a physicist there has been murdered and a graffiti of the Illuminati is written across his chest. Robert Langdon is the professor of symbology and has written a book on the Illuminati, a centuries old secret group which has pledged revenge on the Catholic Church. And a tiny device developed by CERN has been stolen, something to do with anti-matter and stuff, a device which can set a huge controlled explosion.
Elsewhere in the world, the old Pope has kicked the bucket and they are holding elections for the next one. It becomes immediately clear that the anti-matter device is somewhere in the Vatican. Not only all the top contenders for the post of the Pope are going to be killed, one each per hour, each one in a different church. Rome is full of churches, so it difficlut to stop these murders.
This sets up the scavenger hunt, as only Robert can unravel the clues as to where the next murder is going to take place. This is the best portion of the book but dries up a little too soon. A hundred and fifty pages before the end of the novel, the Vatican is in turmoil as these murders come to light and it falls to one man to manage it all and here, Brown loses the plot. The book becomes giddy, overwrought and unsuspenseful.
The legends of the Illuminati which read the same backwards and forwards, recreated here are cool. The action is exicting for the most part too. The good thing about this book is that Brown manages to weave in a lot of his information into a dense plot and both feed off on each other. It also helps that the information is not facile and does not feel like you've read it all somewhere before as in The Da Vinci Code.
Curiously enough, until the other book became a success, nobody noticed this one. But, if part of success is to bring deserving readership to adeserving books, then the wide success of The Da Vinci Code has accomplished at least something good.
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