In Order to Write

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown — reprint

April 23rd, 2008 | by smokingpen |

Dan Brown wrote Angels and Demons. This is not his first book, and for those who have been in a bookstore within the past year you know that he has a wickedly popular book that follows up Angels and Demons - dealing with the same principle character, a professor of art history at Harvard University.

The book begins with this professor, Robert Langdon, rudely be awakened from a dream of him, married, climbing to the top of the great pyramid, by a phone call. Someone on the other end of the line is talking to him about the Illuminati, a group he has researched and studied for most of his professional academic career. He doesn’t buy the story, tells the guy he isn’t interested in some hoax, and in the end hangs up on the caller. The caller makes a second call and then tells the professor he is going to send him a fax; the fax contains a picture of a man, his head turned one-hundred-eighty degrees and the word “Illuminati” burned into his chest.

From that moment until the very end of the story the book does not stop with the action and readability. Admittedly, it took me about two weeks of, off and on, starting and stopping the reading of the book to finally start reading and not stop. My impetus to start reading, and not stop, was my pulling out of school, finishing a stack of other novels, to include American Gods, and having nothing else sitting around my room that really screamed at me to read them. There are still other books, fiction and non-fiction, sitting around my room, but at the same time, it’s not been super important for me to get to them right now. I have other priorities.

However, Angels and Demons, over about 500 to 600 pages, cover about eighteen hours of a single day. We start by learning that a top secret, high security, physics lab in Europe has been invaded and one of the top physicists now lays dead in his apartment. Max Kohler, the director of the facility, has put the apartment under lock and key and has caused the temperature in the apartment to drop well below freezing to protect the body of the physicist. From that moment forward we are taken on a ride through high-tech gadgetry and religious icons. The reader is taken from Switzerland to Rome and into the heart of the Vatican where a bomb of immense power has been placed by the Illuminati.

Robert Langdon is joined, in Switzerland, by the dead physicists daughter, Vittoria. She is Italian and also a physicist who has been working with her adopted father, a Catholic Priest, on a very secret project. With the death of her father she is the only person in the world who knows how to stop a chain reaction that will, inevitably, destroy the Vatican and possibly much of Rome.

The journey, form beginning to end, takes the reader on a journey of Rome, through a history of the Illuminati, into the sanctity of the Catholic church while revealing history and tradition in the election of a new pope as the College of Cardinals prepares to replace the previous pope, now dead for fifteen days. The reader is further taken into the bowels of Vatican City.

Outside of Vatican City Robert and Vittoria go on a quest to save the four preferred Cardinals who have been abducted by the Illuminati before they are killed. This journey takes them from one Cathedral to another, while determining and interpreting the symbols and clues in each that will lead them to the next Cathedral in time to stop the next murder - and branding. Each Cathedral represents one of the traditional four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and each of the Cardinals will die by one of four methods, by Earth, by Air, by Fire, and by Water. Time is of the essence, they have less than a total of four hours to accomplish the task, and in the end the outcome is less than optimal.

Without giving away the twist to the story, the bomb does go off as it requires very specially designed charging stations, at the last minute. A new pope is selected and Robert Langdon - over 569 pages - falls madly in love with Vittoria, who in turn, falls for him.

Dan Brown is an amazing writer who, I believe, stands on the cusp of writing another amazing novel after The Da Vinci Code or falling into the same trap that so many other writers have fallen into. Publish at any cost because anything they produce is going to make them a million dollars.

Angels and Demons is worth reading and makes me want to pick up The Da Vinci Code when I have finished reading the new list of books I have waiting to be read.

Reprinted from www.sw-c.com