Review: Angels & Demons
I finished Angels & Demons by Dan Brown last night.
It was good and only slightly marred by the fact that I’d read the DaVinci Code first, so I knew that Robert Langdon would survive. The rest, however, was a merry chase through the Vatican city.
Ah, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. This is the story that introduces us to the hero of the best-selling book and major motion picture, the DaVinci Code, Robert Langdon. He’s well known by now, of course, as a Harvard symbologist specializing in rather strange and occult subjects. In this book, he’s chasing the Illuminati, who were long thought dead or subsumed by the Freemasons. But, with the “invention” of anti-matter, along with a suitable containment device, the Illuminati make a sudden reappearance. They apparently send their agent to steal the highly unstable and explosive antimatter to use as a spectacular act of religious terrorism by blowing up the Vatican City. Robert Langdon is called in by the head of CERN, where the antimatter was created, for his help and to use his expertise regarding the obscure Illuminati to “save the day”. The rest of the plot, I’ll leave you to discover yourself by reading the book.
Okay, this is not quite Nabakov, but it is a fairly good read. I actually liked it better than The Da Vinci Code, but the writing is certainly no better or worse. Dan Brown isn’t the hack that a lot of literary critics make him out to be, but, then again, he’s not Ernest Hemingway or Charles Dickens, either. Angels & Demons is good, light, reading that still has some fairly high-minded premise. As I menitoned earlier, it’s a decent enough book, though I wouldn’t want to make a steady diet of Brown’s work.
Today, at lunch, I started reading No Plot? No Problem!, which is the “official” handbook for NaNoWriMo, hopefully, in preparation for attempting to participate in November. That’s a ways off, so I’m not quite willing to commit to that, but, still, I’m thinking about it.
