The Da Vinci Code is everywhere. It’s in the bookstores, it’s in the courtroom and it’s soon to be in the movie theatre. Dan Brown’s immortality is assured with that one title. Unfortunately it’s fame, or infamy, may obscure the fact that it’s not a one hit wonder, that Dan Brown has written other books just as deserving of attention.

Angels & Demons is, in a manner of speaking, a prequel to The Da Vinci Code. It introduces the character of Robert Langdon for the first time. Langdon is a forty-year-old professor of religious iconology. He lives alone and lonely though fully if a bit eccentrically.

“Langdon’s friends had always viewed him as a bit of an enigma--a man caught between centuries. On weekends he could be seen lounging on the quad in blue jeans, discussing computer graphics or religious history with students; other times he could be spotted in his Harris tweed and paisley vest, photographed in the pages of upscale art magazines at museum openings where he had been asked to lecture.”

Langdon receives a fax from an unknown but persistent source. Upon it is the picture of a naked corpse branded with a single word: Illuminati. Langdon is stunned, bewildered and intrigued; against his better instincts he agrees to help the mysterious contact solve the murder. The scene of the crime is the Counseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN), an actual establishment, as assured in the author’s note, and the world’s largest scientific research facility located in Switzerland.

The Illuminati, a group touting some famous members including Galileo, are an ancient organization devoted to science. Through the years it has come to be known as the world’s oldest and largest satanic cult, satanic in the old historical sense of the word, meaning one whom opposes the church and its teachings. Before this violent act, the group was thought to be defunct for over a half century. If the Illuminati are extinct, who has committed the murder and branded their name on the dead man’s chest?

The deceased was not only a scientist, a physicist to be exact, he was a Catholic priest. His very existence exemplified the battle between evolution and intellectual design. At the heart of the conflict is the late priest’s research, science on such an astounding level it could prove the existence of God. A particle accelerator, a sixteen-mile long tube shaped machine smashes atoms together, allowing study on the subatomic level. A byproduct of the mechanism, antimatter, a substance ten times more powerful and deadly than nuclear fusion.

The dead man’s daughter, Vittoria Vetra, is also a physicist working at CERN, and impressive in her own ways, not only her genius as a scientist.

“Vittoria Vetra looked nothing like the bookish physicist he had expected. Lithe and graceful, she was tall with chestnut skin and long black hair that swirled in the backwind of the rotors. Her face was unmistakably Italian—not overly beautiful, but possessing full, earthy features that even at twenty yards seemed to exude raw sensuality.”

Vetra is compelled to join Langdon in the search for the perpetrator of her father’s murder and the missing antimatter, a substance that could annihilate a half-square block, destroying everything and anything in its path. Not only must Langdon and Vetra find the material, they must do it in less the twenty-four hours.

This well-written, intelligent, and commanding work has much in common with Dan Brown’s more famous work. As in The Da Vinci Code, the violent foot soldier, the one who carries out the vicious acts, is an single named foreigner with strange habits and tastes under the orders of a mysterious commander. Both books share the thought-provoking, conversation-stimulating theme of science versus spirituality. And they are both written in the same style, utilizing short, choppy little cliff-hanging scenes that are propelling in both nature and content, many of them no more than one page long. Yet Brown’s economy of words still encapsulates the setting and action with magnetic brevity. He uses a multitude of hints, none subtle enough to be called foreshadowing, to entice and stimulate interest in the story. This constant teasing is not offered in vain; the last hundred pages are pure action, a boiling tempest of turns and twists continually changing what appears to be the path to the conclusion. Angels & Demons delivers the same excitement and ultimate reading satisfaction as the much-talked about Da Vinci Code.

Donna Russo Morin
© March 2006