Confused Critique - Clients & Daemons

If you reverse engineered from the topic and figured out that this is the review of "Angels and Demons"(AD), pat your back with a nice turkey towel. You going to crack algorithms, fix bugs, create processes and design new patents. You are a certified geek (applause). Women ?? Err, no mate, not in this birth atleast. Why do you think i suggested a turkey towel ?? Thatz the closest you are going to get to a soft pat in the pack for the next hundred years.

After the supra-hugea-mega-grossa-monstra success of "Da Vinci Code"(DVC), dan brown (DB) has become a household name. So much so that everyone who claims to be capable of reading english has read it, and keeps talking about it until you drop dead. It has also become an additional baggage along with a makeup kit for look-i-read-english-books women. Just to make sure that there is something else about dan brown that i could talk about, picked up his other books and got through this one first.

After reading AD, the first thing that strikes you is that DVC is an eloboarte joke played on all the reading public by DB. Replace france with the vatican, the priory of sion with the illumanti, an albino with an arab and a long legged mademoiselle with adventurous signorina, and voila, you have Angels and Demons. The start, the clues, the unravelling of the plot and the standard description reading "all art works in this book are true" make you turn back to the cover pretty often just to make sure that you are reading a new book and not DVC again.

So, what do we have in AD ?? As usual, we have a historic and occult brotherhood, which has lived through the ages in secrecy, swearing to wreck vengeance on its sworn enemy, and while all this is happening, we have an unsuspecting villain pulling strings with an hidden agenda. Langdon wakes up one fine day, gets pulled into a quagmire, meets a bold-and-beautiful lady who is related to a principal character who got killed in the opening chapter, keeps running, solves clues which only he can solve, runs again, solves more clues, keeps running till you wish he should probably stop, take a deep breath and enjoy life and in the end gets the better of the bad guys and takes a break for a romantic weekend with the lead lady. Sigh, no matter how hard i try, it sounds like DVC again and again.

One refreshing thing about AD is the fact that it is definitely better than DVC, but suffers from the sibling curse, where talented folks are and would remain relatively less popular than illustrious siblings. The last act in AD is a bit far-fetched too, but definitely better than the oh-so-he-was-the-bad-guy-all-along lame ending in DVC. Langdon tries hard to be the american bond, trying too hard to be a hero whom someone can take home and introduce to your friends, unlike bond who ends up in bed with most of them.

All this doesnt take anything away from DB's extensive research and usage of symbols and paintings to further the suspense. The ambigrams used in this book are so true and intelligently designed. All this looking for symbols gives you a nice feeling until you end up trying to read almost everything that you see and find some occult phenomenon from harmless scribblings. Heck, I tried you read some coded message inscribed in my wardrobe, in the universal language of mathematics, and eventually figured out thats just the measurements written in pencil by the carpenter. So much for my symbology.

My cast :
Langdon - Hugh Jackman/John Cusack (for all the women who wanted richard gere, he sucks .. oh yeah, he does)
Vittoria - Charlize Theron (or monica belluci)
Kohler - Ben Kingsley
Olivetti - Jean Reno
Carlo Ventresca (the camerlengo) - Guy Pearce
Hashashin - Art Malik

In the end, does AD deliver ?? Yes it does. Is it better than DVC, most likely. Would one recommend it to others?? Yep. Would one bother reading it again ?? Errrm, No. AD is a good read, even unputdownable at times, but a second read is required only if you are an aspiring symbologist or if you lied to your girlfriend that you have been to the vatican. It is no piece of booker-worthy literature (if it had been, i wouldnt have read it to begin with :-) ), but nevertheless a very good company to kill time unlike some recommended robin cooks i was cursed enough to have read.