Angels and Demons
By Dan Brown
Pocket Books, 2000, $24.95.

A physicist with the Swiss research institute known as CERN has discovered antimatter — the ultimate weapon.

But because he is a Catholic priest concerned about the human condition, the physicist takes pains to keep his secret from falling into the wrong hands. Only he and his adopted daughter, Vittoria, know of its existence.

But someone else does know. The evidence becomes clear when the priest/physicist is found murdered in his living quarters. His sample of antimatter has been stolen.

Robert Langdon, a renowned Harvard symbologist, is summoned to Geneva to consult with the elusive director of CERN, who wants to keep the murder a secret until they can track down the missing antimatter and save the world from annihilation.

Sounds familiar as a plot, doesn’t it?

Well, it is and it isn’t.

Dan Brown has spun a tale of deception, history and morality, entwined with a mystery that opens another enigma as soon as the first one is solved.

Langdon is summoned because the murder victim’s body has been branded with the word Illuminati, styled in ambigrammatic graphics. Ambigram is not in my dictionary, but it represents a word that reads the same upside down when written in ancient Roman style.

The reader’s first evidence of this is seen on the dust jacket. The title “Angels and Demons” reads the same upside down, and the publisher has designed the dust jacket in ambigrammatic fashion.

Langdon is familiar with the Illuminati, an ancient cult that he thought was long extinct. The Illuminati, it seems, existed in the Middle Ages in the era when the Church versus Science dilemma was considerably more serious business than today’s debate over Creationism and Darwinism. Those were the days when Galileo and Copernicus were forced to renounce their scientific discoveries, long before Darwin produced his theory of evolution.

With his background in the subject, Langdon joins Vittoria in a dangerous venture to locate the antimatter and save not only Vatican City but all mankind.

This is a delicate time in the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope has just died, and the College of Cardinals has been called into conclave to go about the sacred business of selecting a successor.

The Illuminati kidnap the four leading contenders for the papacy and inform the media that the antimatter has been concealed in a secret place, where it will explode at midnight on the very day that Langdon and Vittoria arrive at the Vatican.

What follows is a series of riddles which Langdon must solve one by one while they both find themselves ensnarled in the knotty papal protocol dating to the earliest days of the church.

Vittorio and her late father, both scientists, believe strongly that religion and science are compatible, a theory that feeds Dan Brown’s thoughtful suspense tale.

As one character says: “The laws of physics are the canvas God laid down on which to paint his masterpiece.”

“Angels and Demons” is indeed a suspense novel — you’ll swallow your heart on almost every page for the final one-third, but it is a skillfully written morality tale as well.

In an interview the author was asked if he thinks science or religion will win the war. He replied, in part: “That’s a difficult question because in many ways I see science and religion as the same thing. Both are manifestations of man’s quest to understand the divine. Religion savors the questions while science savors the quest for answers. Science and religion seem to be two different languages attempting to tell the same story, and yet the battle between them has been raging for centuries and continues today.”

Brown is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, where he has taught English and creative writing. He lives in New England.