There is so much wrong with Angels & Demons. Dan Brown’s prose is pretty atrocious. The presentation of science, religious traditions, and history are often poorly-researched. Despite being branded (so to speak) with Harvard and CERN pedigrees, the characters lack common sense and seem like they got their education on early internet message boards. The plot conveniences are so plentiful they literally start falling from the sky.
While casual readers who pick this up because they liked The Da Vinci Code, or because they saw it on the airport bookshelf, might look pass many of the book’s inaccuracies, anyone with a high-school level understanding of world history, basic knowledge of such profound concepts as gravity, or familiarity with Catholic practices and rituals will inevitably be distracted by the numerous inaccuracies scattered throughout this book. These range from Dan Brown’s irrelevant claim that the Catholic eucharist borrows from the Aztec practice of eating flesh (nearly 1500 years, the vast Atlantic Ocean, and the vaguest awareness of the European colonization of the Americas aside) to the entire illuminati plot hinging on the assumption that in a world where graphic designers and calligraphers exist (they clearly worked on this book after all) nobody could possibly create a few ambigrams. I could go on, but one does not read Dan Brown for his academic rigor.
And yet, dare I say I enjoyed this book. If nothing else, Angels & Demons is a gripping page-turner with unrelenting pacing that will leave you wanting to take a trip to Rome to see all the tourist sites you’ve just been spoon-fed Wikipedia summaries of. The novel is at its absolute best when Robert Landon and Useless Objectified Generic Female Sidekick (sorry, Vittoria) are dashing around Rome seeking the Path of Illumination in their mad dash against time to stop an illuminati assassin from publicly executing four cardinals. The novel’s thematic exploration of science vs. religion is also, while unoriginal, quite compelling at times. There is a point at which a character gives a pretty convincing speech about the importance of faith in the modern world, and it actually felt like Dan Brown had something important he wanted to say.
I would be lying if I condemned Angels & Demons as a bad book. Sure, as a work of literature, it is a failure. But as a work of entertainment, it shimmers with the splendor of the illuminati diamond… if such a thing even exists.
The Once and Future Lit 