sozobe wrote:I've read this book and only this book, and then only for my book club -- people have urged me to read "Angels and Demons" and I've been resistant.
You are wise to resist.
I normally don't read "popular literature," but I found a worn, abandoned copy of "Angels and Demons" in the seat pocket during a LA-to-Chicago flight. I was bored with the reading material that I had brought, so I spent the next four hours reading "A&D," which is the first (and only) book of Dan Brown's that I have ever read.
My impressions: Brown is a rather poor writer whose research is often flawed or superficial (or both), but who has hit upon a gimmick that sells lots of books. In this case, the gimmick is something like a treasure hunt, where the clues all lead to the solution of a murder mystery. Here, the treasure hunt involves Renaissance art and architecture in Rome.
As a gimmick, it is appealing. The story, however, is preposterous and the logical and factual gaffes are, at times, astounding. To take just one example: the protagonist, following clues laid down in the seventeenth century, is trying to discern a trail that leads from church to church in Rome. The trail, however, leads to a spot in Vatican City, and the protagonist is baffled, since it wouldn't make sense to have the trail lead to a church that wasn't in Rome but rather in Vatican City. But the solution to the mystery (which the author apparently never considered) is obvious: in the seventeenth century, there
was no such thing as Vatican City -- it was
all Rome! The accord with Italy that established the Vatican as a separate state was reached in the 1920s. In the seventeenth century, however, the entire city (along with most of central Italy) was run by the papacy.
Obviously, this is the kind of sloppy error that one would expect from a somewhat talented high schooler, not a best-selling author (I understand Brown made a similar error in "The DaVinci Code," where he depicts Opus Dei as a monastic order -- it isn't). Not that those errors (and there are many) detracted from the enjoyability of the book: the idiotic plot and the cliche-ridden, amateurish writing did that. Given those credentials, I expect that Hollywood is hard at work on a film version.
(One advantage, though, to reading "A&D" is that it permits one to understand
candidone's avatar)
