Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

When a world renowned scientist is found brutally murdered, a Harvard professor, Robert Langdon, is summoned to identify the mysterious symbol seared onto the dead man’s chest. His conclusion: it is the work of the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood presumed extinct for nearly four hundred years - now reborn to continue their bitter vendetta against their sworn enemy, the Catholic church.

In Rome, the college of cardinals assembles to elect a new pope. Yet somewhere within the walls of the Vatican, an unstoppable bomb of terrifying power relentlessly counts down to oblivion. While the minutes tick away, Langdon joins forces with Vittoria Vetra, a beautiful and mysterious Italian scientist, to decipher the labyrinthine trail of ancient symbols that snakes across Rome to the long-forgotten Illuminati lair – a secret refuge wherein lies the only hope for the Vatican.

But, with each revelation comes another twist, another turn in the plot, which leaves Langdon and Vetra reeling and at the mercy of a seemingly invincible enemy…

I'd managed to avoid, like the plague, both reading and watching The Da Vinci Code. Firstly because I'm not a fan of mystery/detective novels and secondly, the choice of Tom Hanks as lead in the movie adaptation did nothing to make me rush out and go buy it. But, when you have nothing to read and someone hands you a Dan Brown novel, you do what you have to do. You read it.

And perhaps, like me, you'll be severely surprised. The prologue starts out incredibly dramatically with the words 'Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own'. Immediately, as Dan Brown intended, I was hooked. I had to find out why his flesh was burning, who was burning it and why. And more importantly, who Phsyicist Leonardo Vetra was.

I'm not going to give the plot away any more than the blurb does - but the only role Vetra plays is the dead guy that sets the whole chain of events in motion, with his eyeball. [I'll say no more.]

Reasons why I enjoyed this book:

I love Art History. I love conspiracies. Combine the two, and you've got me hooked. The book fictionalizes a story about the Altars of Science in Rome consisting of four locations, each representing the four elements - air, earth, wind and fire—which are believed to be "the Path of Illumination", a trail to the meeting place of the Illuminati in Rome.
According to the book, the "altars" were hidden as religious artwork in order to avoid the wrath of the Vatican and secure the secrecy of the Illuminati. The artworks that make up the Four Altars were all sculpted by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. An artist I well remembered from Art Theory in high school. So the new spin on an old story, for me, was worthwhile.

I've always been fascinated by the Illuminati and the Free Masons. Although there wasn't much detail on them, nothing the reader shouldn't already know about the Illuminati, there was some interesting conjecture about who belonged to the Illuminati, some figures, who in fact, predate the organisation's existence.

It was an exciting, easy read. The age-old story of the war between science and religion, but viewed through the prism of historical art. The plot reminded me very much of something I heard somewhere recently, I think it might have been in the film Ultraviolet (then again, it might not have been. There's every chance I heard it in some documentary, but that's besides the point) that 'science has long looked for ways for man to live better and kill quicker'. In this book it is suggested that scientists, through discovering antimatter, have done both. It's a practically limitless energy source, but also a potentially lethal weapon. In fact the most dangerous of all.

Reasons why I wasn't so thrilled with this book:

Dan Brown uses various fictional experts as tools to expound on the factual issues he creates in the story. This is intended to suggest that what these characters relate to the reader is fact, not fiction. However, he gets a lot of things wrong. I'll leave that to you to discover for yourself when you read this novel. But suffice it to say that he was acknowledged as a poor researcher after a court case relating to The Da Vinci Code. In relation to Vatican procedure, which is of disputed accuracy, he claims "Occasionally, research is simply a matter of finding the proper printed resource." and explains he used a single book as his source.

I found the characters hard to believe, and thus hard to relate to. The main character, Robert Langdon, was too much of a know-it-all. His encyclopediac knowledge of art history and the Illuminati just happens to include the artist Bernini and some of his severely obscure works. And luckily, just luckily, the art works that make up the so-called 'Path of Illumination' are in all existence some couple hundred years later.

Lastly, the ending was a bit too 'romantic drama' for me. The genre is supposed to be 'adventure/thriller' and there's nothing adventurous or thrilling for me having to read about the nerdy Harvard professor and the sexy Italian scientist hooking up and getting it on. If I ruined the story for you, I apologise and agree. This ruined it for me too.

All in all, Dan Brown has some interesting theories and does put a modern spin on the age-old science/religion debate by suggesting that science can prove that God created the Earth from nothing. In terms of judging a book by it's cover - this is one cool cover. One of the central motifs of this book is the use of ambigrams, so making the cover page into an ambigram was pretty inventive. And is definitely a good selling point.

I was forced, by unfortunate circumstances, to read a Dan Brown novel. Although Angels and Demons wasn't a complete waste of my time, I shall, in future, return to avoiding his works like the plague.

Buy this book online at Amazon, Amazon UK, Kalahari or Loot.