Angels and Demons - Dan Brown

I don't really have a great deal to say about this book specifically. When I read it I read it fast but that is Dan Brown's style. He writes page turners. His style is fast-paced and engaging without challenging his readers too much. In short, Dan Brown writes fantastic movies (note that I use the word 'movies' and not 'films').

There is an interesting phenomenon that I would like to mention before springboarding into a related rant and that is an interesting tendency for readers of authors like Dan Brown to rate the books inside the author's own canon. More than once I have heard of Angels and Demons called a 'better book than The DaVinci Code. I find this interesting since the main character is the same, the style is the same, and the plot is not all that different. In the words of Oscar Wilde "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all." Despite this, the very same system of valuation is why I own Angels and Demons and not The DaVinci Code.

This leads me to another discussion upon which Dan Brown is the subject. You will recall a few years back when The DaVinci code was on the best seller list and conservative Christianity was in uproar over the supposedly apocryphal nature of the book's narrative. The issue involved Brown's appropriation of some recent pseudo-historical research involving Jesus and the possibility of a romantic affair with Mary Magdalene that may have produced offspring. Thus the term sang riall (royal blood) came to be known as sankreall, or what we understand in an Arthurian context as The Holy Grail (the true etymology of either term is still in question and may in fact be coincidental).

Throughout the DaVinci debacle, while Dan Brown was undoubtedly sipping tumblers of Louis XIV thanks to the attention he received (there is no such thing as bad press, after all) I was wondering the whole time why it was that a work of fiction, not only that but an average work of fiction in the literary continuum should cause such an uproar. It was, after all as I've reiterated, fiction! If there was anything that we ought to be incensed over it would be Brown's lack of credit given to the researchers who developed the theory he used. Why cause such a fuss when, according to his readers, The DaVinci Code wasn't even his best book?

But I guess this is just another entry in a tradition of misappropriations of blame and misguided anger. No doubt it is the same mentality that sought to ban Huckleberry Finn for its use of the N-word. The grand irony that I can't help but point out is that all the fuss made over Brown's book served to canonize it much more solidly in the annals of pop-fiction.