Title: Angels and Demons
Author(s) Name(s): Dan Brown
Published in: August, 2023
Why You Might Like This Book: Read this book if you enjoy
- fast-paced thrillers,
- science-fiction based thrillers,
- dark fiction,
- unexpected twists,
- revenge, and
- moral ambiguity.
Who Should Avoid This Book: Avoid this book if you are triggered by or dislike
- violence, murder, and torture,
- psychopathic or sociopathic characters,
- terrorism and extremism,
- your religious sentiments getting hurt,
- unrealistic, fictional, pop science, or
- grief and loss.
Angels and Demons is a fast-paced thriller novel that blends themes of science-fiction, art, history, religion, and world politics. This is the first novel in a series of standalone thriller books featuring the lead character Robert Langdon. A high-stakes crime has occurred and the clues left by the criminals indicate that an ancient, dangerous cult has resurfaced after a long time of hiding away. This is Langdon’s area of academic expertise, so he is brought to the location, and he learns that there is not much time left before the ticking bomb could cause mass murder or whatever the criminals have planned. Can he help stop the incident?
Robert Langdon is a professor at Harvard university, who is an expert in religious symbology. He lives a peaceful life, alone in his apartment. Suddenly one day, early in the morning, he receives a call from someone he doesn’t recognize, and the voice on the other end insists that this is important and ugent. Initially, he gets irritated and rubs this off as yet another one of those calls he often gets from overly religious people who believe that they have seen something divine or unbelievable. But when he gets a fax message of a photograph, showing the body of a tortured and brutally murdered man with the symbol of the “Illuminati” carved on his chest, Langdon realizes that this is not a joke.
After all, for a very long time, the Illuminati were nowhere to be found, none of their actions showed up anywhere. This is the first time such a symbol or action shows up after a long break, so Langdon himself is curious, and agrees to meet the caller. Without knowing where he is going or whom he will be meeting, he leaves home, following the instructions he was given, getting past several rounds of security checks and travelling by advanced means of transport to meet the caller. The person who called him was the top-most authority, the director and a leading scientist at CERN, Maximilian Kohler, who is intellectually smart but is bound to a wheelchair (a character inspired by Stephen Hawking?).
In this story, “the Illuminati” refers to a fictional anti-Christian group that was formed in the 1500s in Rome by powerful scientists who vocally opposed the Church and rebelled against the Church for trying to silence them and forcing everyone to abide by their religious faith. This conspiracy about an ancient anti-Christian group coming back to target the religious authorities would be a major theme in this story. The book moves between two perspectives or sides, one being what Langdon and his allies see and follow, and the other being who these Illuminati members are and how they act.
Most fictional stories inspired by science come with some absurdities. In Angels and Demons, such absurdities include the director of CERN not calling the cops or detectives when they have so much funding and value secrecy and privacy a lot and calling a symbologist (a person who studies symbols) instead, the symbologist saying things that would leave a very well-educated scientist speechless, and the scientist asking this symbologist to investigate instead of asking the best detective agencies and the right authorities in the world to intervene, apart from purely unscientific concepts like theo-physics being studied at CERN. Also, most male authors of his time, like Dan Brown felt the compulsion and excitement to sexualize their female characters, so when Brown says that there will be a woman to show up soon, you should naturally expect how he is going to objectify her and describe her beauty and body parts. In this case, the woman walking towards Langdon is grieving, crying because she lost her father and is in shock, and even in such a state, Langdon (Brown) wouldn’t miss the opportunity to talk about her breasts. If you can ignore such ridiculousness and perversion, then you could enjoy the book for the excellent thriller that it is.
The scientist found dead was Leonardo Vetra, a particle physicist in his late 50s, who worked there at CERN with his daughter Vittoria Vetra as his research partner, who was away for the week. Langdon is convinced that just because they found the Illuminati symbol on the victim, that does not mean that the old, aggressive, revenge-seeking group must have resurfaced. He argues that they used to target only the religious and they would never hurt a fellow scientist. But he learns that Leonardo was a “theo-physicist”, someone who was working on uniting physics with god or spirituality and he had succeeded in proving some of his theories. Also, they had twisted the victim’s neck by 180 degrees, stripped him naked, and had taken away one of his eyes apart from carving their symbol on his chest, but this is not how the Illuminati used to attack, so is this really that old group or is someone else presenting themselves as the Illuminati? On the other side, a powerful man (an insider?) called “Janus”, which is his pseudonym, had contacted the “Hassasin” to get him to kill the professor. The Hassasin had considered it an honour and he had enjoyed the murder he had committed, considering himself to be successful. This is just the first step and there is more to come, for which the murderer is excited.
Vittoria reveals to Kohler and Langdon that her father had found a way to recreate the universe, even though only on a small scale, thereby proving that matter can be created from pure energy, claiming that she has proof in that lab that her father had created “antimatter” from nothing. She says that this research was strictly private for two years, known only to her father and herself, so nobody else could have known. But getting into his lab required a retina scan, and that explains why the dead scientist’s eye had gone missing. Questions arise among the three people in the laboratory, Kohler, Langdon, and Vittoria about where the anti-matter is now, who could have stolen it, how did they even know about this secret that only Vittoria and Leonardo were aware of, what did they intend to do with the highly powerful source of energy they had stolen, and so on. Soon, Kohler receives a call from the Vatican City, but he falls sick, so Langdon and Vittoria travel there.
In Vatican City, it is the time of the Holy Conclave, the world-renowned event that is highly popular among Christians worldwide, the event where the most powerful priests gather and spend a few days together, cut off from any contact with the outside world, to elect the next Pope. The man who served as the former Pope has died, even though he seemed to be healthy, which seems mysterious, and by the time these two arrive there, a few mysterious incidents have already happened: four of the most powerful priests are not present there at the gathering and have gone missing and from a live camera within the premises but without its exact location known, the stolen antimatter’s image is received. The Chief Commander Olivetti refuses to believe or even take Vittoria and Langdon seriously, until the camerlengo, the man in charge of the office of Pope for the interim period until the next Pope gets elected, and the rest of them there hear from a mysterious caller who informs them of the threat, that the four missing fathers will be killed one by one and the antimatter will destroy Vatican City. The caller identifies himself as a member of the Illuminati, the Hassasin, so now everyone who doubted that the Illuminati could be back is kind of convinced that the old cult is back.
There are four senior members of the church who have been kidnapped, the anti-matter will soon be used to attack and terrorize people, but that is all the information they get, and the Swiss Guard leader and his team is completely lost. The Illuminati have always had connections and members in high-ranking positions everywhere it matters, so they don’t know whom to rely on or call for help. The news can’t spread because this is the single most important event for Christians and the members of the church cannot be disturbed or scared, everything is expected to go smoothly. The stakes are high and it is now up to the camerlengo, the lead Swiss Guard, Vittoria Vetra and Robert Langdon to figure out what the cult members have planned, where the anti-matter is, how to retrieve it, and how to protect everyone there.
Brown knows how to build up the reader’s interest, as he takes advantage of the socio-poltical, cultural tension between the far-right religious conservatives and the progressive non-religious people who oppose religious domination. The dialogue on different sides, containing hate for others, seems to be intentionally provocative because the author knows that most people will want to side with either religion or science, even if most people are not fully familiar with science or true history. By posing the dead scientist and ex-priest who believed that science and religion are two ways of understanding the universe as the archetype of kindness, the director-general of CERN being cold, unempathetic, and disapproving of religion as the “intellectual genius who doesn’t care about humanity”, with the main villain character being a non-white man, an Arab who is obsessed with sex and murder, the main lead male figure as someone who has a neutral perspective about the science vs religion debate whose lust and perversion are presented in “nice guy” ways, and the main target being The Pope at Vatican City, Brown ticks several boxes for a lot of readers worldwide.
Interesting Quote: “The church may not be burning scientists anymore, but if you think they have released their reign over science, ask yourself why half the schools in your country are not allowed to teach evolution. Ask yourself why the U.S. Christian Coalition is the most influential lobby against scientific progress in the world.”
At several points in the story, I rolled my eyes hard and wished I could pluck my eyeballs out because of how far from reality some of the points in the story were. But what kept me going was the pace – and that is certainly worthy of appreciation. There are also several plot twists and if one may say so, even some character arcs. If you happen to be a fan of page-turners and popular best-selling thriller novels, you might like this one.
