“American symbologist Robert Langdon wakes up early one morning and is enlisted to help solve a murder that occured halfway around the globe– a murder that shows clues that a centuries-old secret Satanist sect called the Illuminati are apparently alive and well, and planning the downfall of the Catholic Church. Turns out that the person murdered was a scientist who was able to recreate the Big Bang on a sub-molecular scale, and was thus able to create matter and anti-matter from the collision of particles. Except someone has murdered the scientist, broken into his lab and stolen a cannister of anti-matter which is a dangerous substance, as dangerous as nuclear material and the cannister stolen is enough to level an entire city. Somehow the cannister appears somewhere in the Vatican city, and is set to go off at midnight of the same day.
And what’s going on in the Vatican at the same time? Why the papal enclave where cardinals from all over the world gather to vote on the next pope! The catch is that 4 of the top choices for pope have been kidnapped and one cardinal will be murdered by the Illuminati assassin every hour starting at 8 PM. It is Robert Langdon’s task to hunt down the locations of the cardinals through the use of ancient clues in the Vatican archives relating to the Illuminati, and to therefore save not only the city but also the church from destruction.
My comment: It’s pretty implausible. While there are a few scientific facts in the story, there is also a whole lot of fiction. The book is obviously aimed at being turned into cinema, so maybe the need to provide a more realistic backdrop was unnecessary?
The action sequences are daft to say the least, with the main protagonist making many many illogical choices and a few intuitive ones that quite literally save the day.
Characters are flat and lack substance. The female character (daughter of the murdered scientist) doesn’t seem to add anything to the story except a poorly-conceived romantic angle and of course, providing the assasin with a final kidnap victim.
And yet, and yet. The plot was what kept me going. Well-written plot-heavy books are addictive to say the least. The only real bummer is a last-minute plot twist at the very end which made me want to screech in anger. How could the writer do that? Without revealing the ending, all I can say is that author Dan Brown suddenly turned an action-packed thriller into an episode of Days Of Our Lives. Boo!!! Bad ending!!! Fun read in the middle though.”
acid42 wrote this review Friday, August 10 2007.
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