Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
Too long, gets too many things wrong, but a fun ride
(Review posted 1 Sep 2005 20:53:08)

As readers of various of my other book notes know, I'm perhaps overly sensitive to books that get stuff wildly wrong. If a novelist thinks that heavy things fall faster than light things, or that the Hudson passes through Old Forge, I tend to go phht at the novel regardless of whatever redeeming features it might have. Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons" gets a lot of stuff wildly wrong.

The science is wrong, the philosophy is wrong, and even the symbology (in a book whose hero is a symbologist yet) is wrong. In a pivotal scene, one of the world's leading physicists is amazed to hear that another physicist has created matter from energy, because that's creating something from nothing, and if you can create something from nothing then the creation story in the Bible might be scientifically plausible, and maybe we can unify science and religion! And that's all completely wrong.

Physics thinks of matter and energy as the same thing, so creating one from the other isn't in itself a big deal. And "from energy" isn't at all like "from nothing". And the main problem that modern science has with Genesis isn't about the conservation laws (God could have had a big honking energy source in his pocket); it's about the timescale and the all-at-once stuff, which doesn't square with the fossil record and the evidence of genetics. And it would take a lot more than one key bit of the Bible turning out not to be scientifically absurd to unify faith-based religion with falsification-based science. (The simplistic "science vs. religion" theme that runs throughout the book is similarly annoying; he has supposedly wise and prominent people thinking and saying things at a People Magazine depth of understanding.)

And then in a casual sentence near the end of that same scene the other physicist mentions that she and her father used energy to create anti-matter sufficient to produce more energy in annihilation than it took to produce it in the first place, which would be something amazing, and the big important physicist doesn't say a word. Phht.

More mundanely, talking about the symbology, Brown didn't have to make the claim that ambigrams (cleverly-drawn symbols that look the same upside down as right side up) are incredibly difficult to make, and that "the idea that a word could be crafted into an ambigram seemed utterly impossible" and that people had been trying and failing for generations; this is impossible to believe, since Brown himself does it five times in the course of this book, and Douglas Hofstadter and that crew have been making them and playing with them since the '80's. By making a big deal out of something so false, Brown gets me going phht again.

But okay, on to the redeeming features. The novel is a fun ride in places (although in many cases I think it would have been even funner if Brown had used about half as many pages; we don't really need that much description). It's pleasingly dense with spectacular scenes, gruesome horror, last-second escapes, action and flames and explosions and secret tunnels and ancient documents and stuff; and the interlocking plot-twists at the end are fun and pretty amazing (if no more soberly plausible than you'd expect). And it has lots of meaty stuff about Rome and Art and the history of the Catholic Church and stuff, although given how wrong he gets the science and the philosophy and all I admit I'm a little doubtful about how accurate these other parts are. (I went and looked up Bernini's Ecstacy of St. Teresa online, and while it's not quite as pornographic as he describes it and the angel isn't pointing all that obviously in any particular direction, nothing that he writes about it in the book is obviously completely wrong, so that's good).

So it's a fun potboiler, with action and suspense and stuff, and if it gets some philosophy and science and symbology completely wrong, that's disappointing but not really unexpected. I just like to complain...