Angels and Demons by Dan Brown copywrite 2000 Published by Pocket Books

I can say one posative thing about this book, the "prequel" to the best selling and highly controversial, The DaVinci Code: I now no longer feel that any story I write could be too "far fetched" to be published.

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In order for any story, written or filmed, to be enjoyed, the reader must enter into a loose contract with the creator. That contract is The Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Some stories require a stronger commitment on behalf of the audience, and what you may be asked to beleive depends on the genre. In fantasy it's accepting the existence of parallel worlds, werewolves...whatever. In SF you usually have to swallow one or two "discovery stretches". Historical fiction is not often as hard on the practical mind, though it's usually fraught with coincidences in the interest of moving the story along.

A "general fiction" book, such as Angels and Demons can fall anywhere along within the spectrum of "use your imagination". There are two cardinal rules, though, about fiction and The Willing Suspension of Disbelief. The first one is that the story has to make sense within itself. That is, author creates a world, society, charecters, taboos, etc....and it can be as far out as it can get. But everything that happens has to make sense within the context of the story. You can't suddenly have an angel appear and save the hard boiled detective in a police story, or a 17th century Morman woman suddenly burst out into a speech on womens rights in an historical novel. If you create a sci-fi world where all slaves are mute, you'd better have a pretty involved explanation for it if one of them starts talking. The second rule is that you can't strain creduality. That is, you can create the most fantastic hero you want, he's going to get awefully irritating if he doesn't have even one human weakness or flaw. You can pepper a story with coincidences, synchronicities, and shocking events - indeed, you have to otherwise that would just be daily life and we could all just read the newspaper. But if your story is only moving along because of shocking events that strain at the boundries of common sense, as a writer, you're in trouble.

Dan Brown is in trouble in Angels and Demons. The story starts out promisingly, and those who read The DaVinci Code are so happy to get their hands on another book that that promises to give them something to think about that we're willing to "forgive" this author a lot. When he starts out with the mysterious phone call from the mysterious leader of the mysterious organization, we're all set to take off with Robert Langdon on a fantastic adventure. We've got talk of art, symbology, conspiracy theory,a powerful new weapon of mass destruction, "the clock is ticking" for suspense, and a good looking guy running around in a harris tweed jacket. Who could ask for anything more?

Well, um, some attention to charecter development would have been nice. This book is the opposite of an action movie which doesn't have any plot. It has plenty of plot...enough of a plot for a much longer ,and more carefully thought out book. Moreover, nobody can fault Brown for not having done his research. There are thrilling descriptions of Vatican City, inticing little tid-bits about the relationship of the Vatican to Italy and the rest of the world, little known and highly interesting facts about how a pope is elected, and all of that is first rate. It's like a little tour of art of the Vatican conducted at a breakneck speed through a series of murder investigations....and, for some readers, that may be enough.

But, for me, I started having trouble when as soon as the captain of the Swiss Guard went into a coniption fit about the heroine wearing shorts. Initially, it looked like it was part of some actual charecter development. Okay, this signels that the guy is really rigid, he wants everything by the book. ( Neither men or women are permitted to wear short pants inside the Vatican: they insist on some decorum) But by the time the full extent of the crisis is revealed, and this guy is still hung up on Vittoria Vetra's knees, it borders on insanity....and shortly thereafter, the whole book falls over the edge. If the Vatican is about to be blown to Kingdom Come, I can't imagine a woman on earth whose legs would be that distracting.

Creduality is strained from the first chapter in which we have the murder of the phycisist / priest....who has a daughter, but it's not his biological daughter, it's somebody totally unrelated to him whom he adopted who just happened to become as brilliant a physicist as he was. He invented this powerful "bomb" which someone stole and planted somewhere in Vatican City....where 4 cardinals are missing just as the college gathers to elect a new pope. Okay, we've gone pretty far in suspending disbelief just to get the story set up.

So, when he follows all this up with the "shorts obessession", someone hitting just the right phone button to eventually get connected with the highest administrator in the Vatican, the stacks of the Vatican library being trashed in a desperate struggle, and the flat, flat, flat saintly Carmelengo, evil Hassasin, and ripped -off- from -Indiana -Jones Robert Langdon, I was already lost. By the time he got into people who desired to have children out of "spiritual love" but NOT to have sex, people falling out of helicopters and landing unharmed, a trip to "exhume" the previous pope, and all manner of individuals running harem scarem through some of the most sacred place in Rome....it was almost as bad as one of those seriel comic strips that runs in the paper.

The worst part is that there were many places when a much less far fetched explanation for someone's actions would have done, but Brown goes for high drama all the way. I finished the book out of sheer interest in how he was ever possibly going to manage a plausible ending. Okay, a sort of plausible ending. Okay, any ending. Please, God, let it be over!

It is my understanding that Brown wrote this book before The DaVinci Code and I get the strong sense that he could have done better if he had not been so concerned about writing a "page turner". To that extent, I feel that the fault lies more with his editor than with him. Brown has some good ideas and, properly developed, this could have been an awesome book. He seems to have been constrained by "marketplace thinking" which doesn't trust readers to understand any complex work. Maybe now that he has proven publishing industry leaders wrong the path will open for more books about complex or controversail ideas to be published.

But, probably not. We're probably just in for a whole season of DaVinci Code knockoffs.