What's the ancient pagan symbol for Deja Vu?
Written: Sep 23 '04
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Interesting scientific diversions if you enjoy that sort of things
Cons: If you've read The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons feels like its rough draft
The Bottom Line: Robert Langdon is the next Indiana Jones. If you keep that in mind and don't expect a literary masterpiece, you may enjoy this story.
|
|
|
| prfstars's Full Review: Dan Brown - Angels & Demons Books |
Let’s play a quick game of Name that New York Times Bestseller. I’ll give you a few subtle hints:
1. The story opens with the shocking murder of a high-profile intellectual whose body is defaced with mysterious symbols.
2. Robert Langdon, the dashing Harvard symbologist clad in Harris tweed and a Mickey Mouse watch, needs to solve the crime.
3. Langdon teams up with a grief-stricken female descendant of the deceased, who happens to be a hottie.
4. The brutal assassin genuinely believes in his cause, and answers to an omniscient and anonymous master. The assassin is a mere pawn, and doesn’t understand his master’s true purpose.
5. An eccentric scholar in a position of power may or may not be behind all the bad stuff.
6. There’s an ancient, secret society of high profile men who shroud their mysteries with pagan symbols and numerology, and hide clues in famous works of art, architecture, and literature.
7. There’s a rigid, untrusting police chief who seems to block our hero’s efforts at every turn. He might be a bad guy, too.
8. The bad guy is a sanctimonious megalomaniac intent on altering world-wide perceptions of Christianity, its origins, and its role in modern life.
9. There is a shocking revelation about a main character’s holy parentage.
I could give you a few more clues, but if you’re one of the bazillion readers who’ve devoured Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, you probably recognized the story with the first clue. If you’re one of the nine or so American adults who haven’t read The Da Vinci Code, you probably still guessed it.
You’re all wrong.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you didn’t see the title of this novel up at the top of this page. Admit it—it really sounds like The Da Vinci Code. I’m not going to pretend that I actually bought into any of that book’s fictitious premises, but it was great fun. I enjoyed it so much that I bought Angels & Demons an hour after I finished The Da Vinci Code.
As of this Sunday, The Da Vinci Code will have been on the NY Times Hardcover Bestseller List for 78 weeks. For readers who can’t wait for a second fix of the book’s hero, Robert Langdon, it’s already out there: Dan Brown published his first Langdon story, Angels & Demons, more than four years ago.
The Story
Physicist Leonardo Vetra has been murdered in his lab at CERN, a nuclear research facility in Switzerland. The murderer has mutilated Vetra’s body, stolen dangerous material from his laboratory, and left a trail of clues pointing at his plans to annihilate the Vatican. Unlike The Da Vinci Code, which focuses on the relationship between religion and art, Angels & Demons zeroes in on a much more tempestuous pairing: religion and science. The Catholic Church censured, persecuted, and occasionally executed scientists in the middle ages. One of the most famous examples is that of Galileo. His work on falling bodies and the heliocentric model of the solar system made him too famous to execute, so the church held him under house arrest. This much is true. In Angels & Demons, though, Brown gives Galileo a chance to fight back. He creates a secret society, the Illuminati, in which men of science can preserve and disseminate scientific progress, while at the same time infiltrating society’s power structure and undermining the Catholic Church.
Brown throws enough real science into the mix to make Angels & Demons a tantalizing read. The Scramjet plane that whisks Langdon from Boston to Geneva in an hour is based on real science; NASA has been developing air-breathing airplane engines that will reduce the need for carrying heavy fuel by drawing energy directly from the air. Antimatter, the powerful substance at the heart of the Vatican time bomb, is also real, and it’s truly a by-product of some nuclear reactions. As he does with The Da Vinci Code, Brown introduces just enough fact into the story to lend credence to his more outrageous ideas.
Dan Brown opens this book, as he did the Da Vinci Code, with notes declaring that the secret brotherhood in his story exists, and that all of the details of hidden symbols in art and architecture are factual. There are several books attacking the veracity of his Da Vinci claims, and I’d be just as skeptical of these.
On second though, skepticism isn’t always a good thing. Brown may have completely fabricated all of the intriguing contents of the Vatican’s secret library, vaults, and catacombs, but they were fascinating.
The Writing
Both of Brown’s Robert Langdon novels open with brief, exciting prologues that made me want to keep reading. Brown’s style really encourages page-turning; his chapters are relatively short, and each one seems to answer one mystery and raise a new one. The action scenes go on way too long—they feel like lengthy descriptions of a movie’s action scenes. Like the Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons feels like a movie waiting to happen.
Brown puts together a good story, but if you’ve already read The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons will feel a bit redundant. It’s as if Brown developed a handful of characters, and just gave them different names, occupations, and hairstyles. Ayn Rand once said that all of her previous novels, including The Fountainhead, were merely incomplete prototypes of her masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged. Angels & Demons feels very much like a prototype of The Da Vinci Code. I’d say Dan Brown has only written 1 1/3 Robert Langdon books. I paid for two, so I’d really like my $12 back.
The Characters
Robert Langdon is a likeable guy, and I have no doubt he’ll be back for more adventures. Angels & Demons’ supporting cast—for lack of a better word—stinks. The heroine, who’s also the daughter of the dead physicist, makes a few interesting observations. Mostly, though, she just takes a lot of flak for walking around the Vatican in short-shorts. She’s a brilliant physicist who studies motion in schools of giant tuna (really), but her primary contribution is her background in yoga. It makes her a nimble escapee, and a fantastic lay.
The villains, both the real and imagined ones, are completely two-dimensional. The assassin is an evil sociopath, and the other bad guys move so far out of character that they just seem silly. I was truly surprised by the book’s plot twists, but after nearly 500 pages of progress toward one resolution, the one Brown provides feels… well… weird.
Is It Worth Reading?
I’m truly conflicted about this. I enjoyed reading Angels & Demons so much that I stayed up until 2 AM this morning to finish it. As I finished it, though, I was struck by a wave of disappointment. Dan Brown is no Umberto Eco; Don’t expect to be dazzled by the intellectual aspects of the story. Don’t expect to come to a deeper understanding of science, religion, or philosophy. If you want a fun story to help the time pass on a long flight though, this one will do the trick.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
prfstars
|
 - Top 200 |
|
Location: The Burbs
Reviews written: 302
Trusted by: 237 members
About Me:
Hi.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.