bloodygranuaile

When I cat-sitted (cat-sat?) for my Dad's cousin and her husband last week, I borrowed Dan Brown's Angels and Demons from them. I had read The Da Vinci Code several years ago and had vaguely intended on getting around to reading this one since about then.

Angels and Demons was definitely one of those books that I both enjoyed but also spent a fair amount of time laughing at. I also had that kind of feeling like I get reading Twilight where I start thinking that I could probably get published a lot faster if I stopped taking my writing seriously. (I certainly know enough useless historical and linguistic trivia I could string together into a breathless action-movie-paced riddle plot!)

I don't think Angels and Demons is supposed to be a comedy, although I'm pretty sure the witty one-liners are supposed to be funny; there are a number of lines that sort of have “Look at me, I am a witty one-liner!” hung on them in big neon signs, but in this sort of book you don't mind because the damn thing is an action puzzler about the Illuminati.

There is some odd vaguely science-fictiony stuff going on in here, too (not super science fictiony, but I think still technically science fiction because we do not actually have large antimatter bombs yet, or at least I hope we don't), which ends up working better than you'd think with the whole background of the Church and ancient secret brotherhoods from the Renaissance and symbology and ambigrams and gruesome murders and all that stuff. The plot starts off with the Pope dying (WAS HE MURDERED?!?!) and a scientist-who-was-also-a-priest also dying (THIS ONE WAS DEFINITELY MURDERED). The scientist is mutilated, branded with the sign of the Illuminati, and a can of antimatter is stolen from his lab. Out of the lab, the antimatter is functionally a time bomb, because the canister only has enough batteries to keep the vaccuum going for 24 hours (or something like that), at which point the antimatter will come in contact with the matter of the canister and vaporize everything within a half mile. The action of the entire novel takes place over those twenty-four hours, with Robert Langdon, our Action Hero Academic (and the main character in The Da Vinci Code), and Vittoria Vetra, the dead scientist-priest's very attractive (of course) scientist daughter, running all over the Vatican after the Illuminati, trying to find the can of antimatter and chase the Illuminati assassin who is killing off the four best cardinals, one every hour, at the four ancient Altars of Science, part of some ancient secret Illuminati map to the ancient secret Illuminati meeting place. This involves lots of unraveling of clues that apparently only super genius scientists were supposed to be able to figure out in the 1500s, but I guess science has changed so much then that now only history nerds and symbologists still know any of these “scientific” clues and actual scientists are mostly like “WTF dirt is not an ELEMENT” and also there is a lot of hanging out in the super secret Vatican library vaults reading things that are conveniently in English. (The handwave for having all of this super secret Illuminati communication in English so that the American audience for the book doesn't get confused is actually a pretty good one. Langdon basically claims that the Church avoided learning English for a long time because it is a skanky ho of an ugly-ass hybrid language that was spoken by barbarians, freethinkers and libruls, ergo perfect for hiding things from the Vatican. I think I need to go fact-check that claim at some point.)

There are also a lot of people having various sorts of Deep Thoughts about the nature of the relationship between science and religion, and it was interesting in that Dan Brown never quite seemed to come down definitively on one side or the other, because every time the plot seemed to show up who was the Good Guys and who was the Bad Guys, it ended up getting turned all upside-down ten pages later. Which I quite liked, actually. The book does a fairly good job of showing a multitude of ways in which people can wind up being varying degrees “for” and “against” religion and science, kind of depending on how they grew up with it (so the daughter of the scientist priest thinks that they sort of fulfill two different functions of satisfying people's desires to know things, the priest who was almost killed by a bomb but miraculously survived in a Church thinks that technological advancement is destructive and the Church is magic, and the scientist who is crippled because he got sick as a kid and his parents were too faith-healer-y religious nutjobs to let the doctor actually treat him thinks science is awesome and religion just causes pain and suffering). All ways of arriving at these various mindsets are all treated relatively sympathetically, although certain persons do end up being portrayed as still flat wrong. On the other hand, all this discussion of religion and science meant I had to listen to the camerlengo repeat all the half-assed myths and justifications about God allowing suffering and actual learning things not allowing any room for wonder that theists who can't carry a thought to completion think are somehow full explanations of things. (For example, the analogy of God allowing suffering to the analogy of a parent allowing their child to do something stupid and skin their knee or whatever because that's how you grow up. The reason some degree of “tough love” and not protecting your child from everything in the world as long as you can is necessary is because whatever you do, they WILL grow up and you will NOT be able to protect them from everything in the world indefinitely, so in your time as a parent you basically need to prepare them for not having you around all the time anymore and sending them out into the big scary “real world.” However, if God is omnipotent, then that means that God controls the big scary “real world” too. God's never going to send you out to fend for yourself in a part of the universe where He can't reach you because He is old and living in a nursing home somewhere, or because He is only one person and can't take care of you, your siblings, His spouse, His own aging parents, and Himself all at once. But making someone “grow up” so that they can deal with bad things that are entirely avoidable and which you are throwing at them just to give them the “opportunity” to deal with them isn't omnibenevolence; it's pure Donner Party conservatism.) (Also, if you think scientists have no sense of wonder, you 've clearly never talked to any scientists; even the douchey ones have a pretty well-developed sense of science being awesome (for the real meaning of awesome, not like a hot dog).)

Rehashes of the science-versus-religion wibbling aside, most of this book is pure fun brain candy, even the scholarly bits. We get lessons in Freemason symbolism on the US dollar, admire some pretty ambigrams, run around to lots and lots of churches, and hate on the Swiss Guard for being pompous and rigid. There are fight scenes that are freaking hilarious to read because they are so obviously intended to be filmed, and Our Hero ends up trapped in ancient sarcophagi with really ancient dead people, almost drowning in a Bernini fountain, getting shot at, fighting an assassin of the ancient order of the Hassassin (for realz) with a lead bar, hanging out in hermetically sealed vaults in ancient libraries, and looking at lots of maps. (Libraries and maps are key to any good puzzler adventure story.) One of the maps plot points kind of made me want to punch Langdon in the head repeatedly, but perhaps this is because I read too many terrible genre books (although they also did basically this same trick in the Sherlock Holmes movie, and that is where I remembered it from?). But basically, there are four Illuminati Altars of Science around Rome, and if you find all of them they will lead you to the secret Illumnati meeting place. I found it obvious from “four places that lead you to a fifth” that this will involve four places making a cross shape and the fifth will be at the intersection, particularly considering how much religion has to do with the plot. Langdon, for some reason, spends like half an hour looking at the map between finding places three and four going “A triangle? No, there's one more place. If it's [this church], it doesn't make a square? WHY DOESN'T IT MAKE A SQUARE?! It makes... a kite? A diamond? Whyyyyy? What IS it? I don't get it!” and eventually realizes it's a cross, then spends another half an hour wondering over the ingenious simplicity of it. (Does anyone else find it really messes with their suspension of disbelief if the author has a character spend too much time fawning over the ingeniousness of the author's own plot points?) I'm glad there weren't any secret sciencey clues involving the first handful of prime numbers, because I read a book that used that trick like two weeks ago, and so I probably would have put my head through a wall waiting six pages for Robert and Science Genius Vittoria to figure it out.

There is a Secret Biological Parent twist at the end, too, but it is not about the person you'd expect it to be about, so it actually is surprising.

I think Brown did a better job with the Obligatory Romance in this one than he did in The Da Vinci Code. It helps that Vittoria is not as whiny and annoying as Sophie and she frequently does stuff, although she is occasionally somewhat weirdly fetishized for wearing shorts, but I guess that fits when you're hanging out in the Vatican. Anyway, she doesn't suck, and I suppose introducing how Mediterranean-ly attractive an' sensual an' exotic she is relatively early in the story makes the ending seem less pasted on, even though otherwise their chemistry is relatively minimal due to having most of their time spent running around solving riddles and trying to save cardinals and get the Swiss Guard to cooperate, and not really having much time to hang or have characterization outside of helpful memory flashbacks that give them clues. (I am not actually complaining about any of this. I don't actually want to read a romance between Robert and Vittoria; I want them to solve puzzles and find the assassin and save the Vatican from an antimatter bomb.) (Actually, when there is characterization, I ended up sitting there scanning it for Things That Can Be Turned Into Actual Plot Points Later On to stop myself from not caring.)

Rating: four and a half adrenaline shots

 Terry Deary's Horrible Histories series was all the rage when I was in elementary school way back in the nineties, a period which should probably have its own Horrible History book written up soon. A quick Google informs me that the series is still going strong, sparing me the need to gripe about Kids These Days. It also appears I have a lot of catching up to do! Despite being a decade out of its target market (at least), these books retain the same appeal they had when I was in fifth grade—and not just out of nostalgia, either. They mix corny jokes and cartoons with historical facts, focusing on the gory, unusual, and gross. Since history is so full of gory, unusual and gross things, the books make a fairly solid general history of each period they cover. The series makes a big point of being “The history grown-ups don’t want children to know,” although it is actually quite child-friendly, omitting the age-inappropriate aspects of the stories they recount. The books also include hands-on projects for the reader to try out, such as games and recipes. In short, they are fun.

 The title of The Awesome Egyptians initially had me worried—it sounded like it might be light on horribleness. Luckily, I was wrong. While it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Egyptians were indeed awesome, Deary finds plenty of nasty tidbits to entertain the reader. A fair chunk of the book dwells on ancient Egyptian social issues, particularly class and gender, because they were terrible. We learn about the lives of peasants and the first recorded labor strike; the incestuous line of succession and the complicated mess of rituals that made up the woman-king Hatshepsut’s gender presentation. Much of the book is, of course, about death and mummies and grave-robbing, these being the paramount concerns of both children who like disgusting things and the actual Ancient Egyptians. The book is weakest when covering the subjects all “Ancient Egypt for children” materials cover—a brief roster of gods, a simplified hieroglyphic alphabet—but this is a small portion of the book. Luckily, many more pages are dedicated to the unusual lives and deaths of important Egyptians and Egyptologists, including such colorful events as King Cheops losing his mother's mummy, Queen Ankhesenamun being forced to marry her own grandfather, and the spate of mysterious deaths following the opening of King Tut’s tomb. The Legend of Isis and Osiris is slightly sanitized, of course—Deary claims that Isis found all of Osiris’ body parts, and neglects to tell us that the purpose of this particular legend was to explain what made the Nile Valley fertile. But there’s still more than enough weirdness left to entertain even the least history-inclined child, and the book leaves the reader where any decent ancient history book should leave him or her—with an appreciation, even awe, of the great ancient civilizations, but grateful to be living now instead.

 I reread The Groovy Greeks next, which I recall reading so many times as a wee geek that my copy of it fell apart. I thought I knew a thing or two about the Greeks, back then. I was wrong, of course, and this book—like all books on Greek history or Greek myths for children—suffers much from the degree of bowdlerization necessary to make it child-appropriate. As such, The Groovy Greeks is merely full of cartoon pictures of nude Greeks, references to situations in which Greeks did not wear clothes, a story about Alcibiades knocking the “naughty bits” off statues, and a few references to the Greeks having a low opinion of women. However, it remains entertaining enough to keep a wee geek interested in the Greeks until he or she is old enough to learn that the Greeks were actually more misogynistic than Representative Bobby Franklin and more homosocial than “Life at the Outpost,” and that most of their legends involve rape. But despite this lack of all the most disgusting bits of Greek history and myth, and the undeniably pro-Greek tone of the book (mostly established by frequent use of the word “groovy”), it’s still a Horrible History, because history is messed up. There’s death, and fighting, and death, and human sacrifices, and death. There’s a story about eating babies, and a story about attempted infanticide, and they are not the same story because when Cronos eats his babies, they chill all healthy in his stomach until he throws them up, because whoever wrote the Greek myths was on crack or something. The moral of the story here is, basically: no matter how much you bowdlerize the Greeks, they will still be really interesting because they were that inappropriate.

 The Rotten Romans has its share of gross cultural information, but overall this volume in the series focuses heavily on individual rotten Romans. This is understandable, as there were quite a lot of them. What is also understandable, but a lot more irritating, is that the book also focuses hugely on the Roman Empire in Britain, giving extremely short shrift to the whole other, like, third of the world that they took over. I suppose this is also somewhat understandable, considering the books are written in the UK, but it gives a rather lopsided history.

The Vicious Vikings occasionally succumbs to the same Britain-centric viewpoint, but not as badly. I think my biggest issue with this one was the pages on food, which basically covered “stuff the Vikings used to eat which you might like” and “stuff the Vikings used to eat which are totally gross.” Half the stuff filed under “stuff the Vikings used to eat which are totally gross” is foods that they STILL EAT in Scandinavia today, some of which I have eaten personally. (Moose is delicious.) And I'm really not sure how they determined that young children would obviously find fish-head-and-pepper soup appetizing, but not goose. Or boar, which is basically medieval for “pork.” Overall, though, the book is a lot of fun. A lot of this is because it's just hard to make Vikings boring, but some of it is Deary's ridiculous style. (The book opens with a cartoon of a girl threatening a Jelly Baby. You can't go wrong making jokes about Jelly Babies.)

 The Measly Middle Ages beats out all but possibly the Romans for the most Horrible History in the bunch. This is unsurprising, as the Middle Ages sucked hardcore. Even Deary seems continually surprised at just how craptastic it was, and that is the point of the entire series. There’s a lot about medieval misogyny in this book (I get the feeling it is less glossed over than in The Groovy Greeks because there is less cool other stuff that makes you want to bury it and pretend everything’s okay). However, it is followed up by a few short biographies of kickass medieval ladies who I might need to go buy books on now. Gentle reader, please help me remember the following names: Jeanne de Clisson, Marcia Ordelaffi, Madame de Montfort, and Isabella of England. (Also Joan of Arc, although I already knew who she was.) This book ends on a giant downer, with Deary basically saying “The Middle Ages were full of stupidity, greed and cruelty, also some historians say they ended at the beginning of the Tudor Era but THEY WERE WRONG. IT IS STILL THE MIDDLE AGES.” Then there is a depressing cartoon about a kid doing a school paper on “Religion, war and pestilence” and his mother thinks it’s a history paper BUT SHE IS WRONG.

As such, I eagerly await the “Crappy Current Events” series. I am sure it will be both more factual and more entertaining than watching the news.