Hello to all my viewers, all two of you! Like I said in my intro post, I was going to be giving my view of several general topics. Well I have just finished reading Dan Brown's Angels and Demon, and its time to give my view.Dan Brown is, in my opinion, a great author. His writing style is unique, his plots complex and amazingly written, and it is clear that he put in a lot of time into research. Angels and Demons is the first book in the trilogy that made him famous. Robert Langdon, Harvard symboligist, was contacted one night by fax. The message called for him to meet the sender, and showed an image of a victim of an old satanic cult, the Illuminati. Robert is summoned to one of the world's top research facilities, CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland to help with a serious issue and mystery. The victim, Leonardo Vetra, was making using a particle accelerator to make anti-matter, which in the right hands could power a city for weeks with just a few millimeters. However, in the wrong hands, the same amount can detonate, annihilating everything in a 2 mile radius.Next thing Robert knows he is in Vatican City on a quest to find the antimatter before it blows up the biggest Catholic church in the world.
This story was written with clear expertise. I could not put the book down for a second, and the only thing that could make me shut it was the teacher telling us we were dismissed. The style in which he writes it makes it very real, and I pictured the entire story as I read it. Also, he clearly did great research, and showed it. Throughout the book famous artists and their works are mentioned, he got names and dates correct, he even had the distance and positioning of churches right so that in the end Robert's trail made a perfect cross, an Illuminati symbol. And on top of the research, he also made the story believable. He had great detail, didn't rush through anything, and really made sure people could picture what he was writing about.
In a story there are several factors to how good it is, some being details and style, but also the depth of his characters. His characters all had clearly independent personalities and relationships. For example, Maximilian Kohler, lead scientist at CERN, clearly was a bitter man, who was holding something in. He was not easily amused, and always very serious. Dan Brown did a great job in keeping his personality consistent, and really made me believe this man actually existed somewhere. Dan Brown clearly made his characters very believable, and thus made the story more believable.
