I picked this up ‘cos I wanted something trashy and non-thought-consuming in the run up to my exams. Instead… well, it was still trashy but also so much fun! Damn Dan Brown!
This not only came out before The Da Vinci Code, it’s pretty much the same story, only told so much better. Robert Langdon is called in to lend his knowledge on the Illuminati – and anti-religion cult that may not be as extinct as believed, when dead bodies start turning up branded with Illuminati symbols.
There were things about this book, especially at the start, that annoyed me immensely. Brown’s style is so sensationalist that I can only scoff – sentence structure so hyped that want to slap the man. His characters’ response to the Illuminati are also laughable – okay, I couldn’t tell you a lot about them, but I have heard the name and wouldn’t react with the shock of being told zombies are roaming the earth – which the people here seem to. And there’s something dire about a book trying to present mysteries or gizmos as so clever-clever: “even modern computers couldn’t come up with a way to write the word ‘earth’ ambigrammatically” ... ur, right, but somehow there one is, printed in a bit of pulp fiction. It takes you out of the suspension of disbelief, imo.
That said, the pace is fantastic, the settings perfect, and the whole religion v. science handled better than I would have suspected. The twists are often over-drawn out, but otherwise okay. I thought I saw the ending coming, but then another twist hit me.
Best of all, unlike The Da Vinci Code, I liked the ending here. DVC just… stopped short. This left me smiling. Still trashy, right enough ;)