It takes guts to write a novel that combines an ancient secret brotherhood, the Swiss Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, a papal conclave, mysterious ambigrams, a plot against the Vatican, a mad scientist in a wheelchair, particles of anti-matter, jets that can travel 15,000 miles per hour, crafty assassins, a beautiful Italian physicist and a Harvard professor of religious iconology. It takes talent to make that novel anything but ridiculous. Kudos to Dan Brown (Digital Fortress) for achieving the nearly impossible. Angels and Demons is a no-holds-barred, pull-out-all-the-stops, breathless tangle of a thriller--think Katherine Neville's The Eight (but cleverer) or Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (but more accessible).

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is shocked to find proof that the legendary secret society, the Illuminati--dedicated since the time of Galileo to promoting the interests of science and condemning the blind faith of Catholicism--is alive, well, and murderously active. Brilliant physicist Leonardo Vetra has been murdered, his eyes plucked out and the society's ancient symbol branded upon his chest. His final discovery, anti-matter, the most powerful and dangerous energy source known to man, has disappeared--only to be hidden somewhere beneath Vatican City on the eve of the election of a new pope. Langdon and Vittoria, Vetra's daughter and colleague, embark on a frantic hunt through the streets, churches and catacombs of Rome, following a 400-year-old trail to the lair of the Illuminati, to prevent the incineration of civilisation.

Brown seems as much juggler as author--there are lots and lots of balls in the air in this novel, yet Brown manages to hurl the reader headlong into an almost surreal suspension of disbelief. While the reader might wish for a little more sardonic humour from Langdon and a little less bombastic philosophising on the eternal conflict between religion and science, these are less fatal flaws than niggling annoyances--readers should have no trouble skimming past them and immersing themselves in a heck of a good read. "Brain candy" it may be, but it's tasty. --Kelly Flynn, Amazon.com

2008-08-18 like the clock that struck 13 ...

An entertaining read, though the last quarter gets tiresomely silly.

I would have admired Mr Brown's much-vaunted 'extensive research', and the ingenuity with which he constructs his plot around the topography of Rome (of which I am ignorant), except that in the one area in which I do know a little, he makes such astonishing errors that I cannot take seriously anything else he holds out as fact. Two examples:

1. Yoga, he says, is 'a Buddhist art'. No, it isn't. Its Hindu roots go back hundreds of years before the Buddha lived.

2. More astonishingly, our revered professor of symbology is of the opinion that Chritianity 'borrowed' the concept of the Eucharist (partaking of the body and blood of God) from the Aztecs. Now you can possibly argue that the origins of the eucharist lie in ancient Egypt, or maybe even the Roman cult of Mithras, but the Aztecs? Not only did Aztec culture flourish two continents and a fairly large ocean away from Jerusalem - it only arose about 1100 years after Christianity, by which time the Church had been celebrating the Eucharist, with full transubstatiational theology, for at least 800 years.

If Mr Brown can include errors so basic that 10 minutes on Wikipedia would correct them, what other howlers underlie his book? Of course it's fiction, but not as anchored in the real world as the author would have us believe.