A timeless story
Nusrat Jahan Pritom enjoys a tale
WHEN the book review editor asked me to get some book, I was at a loss. Having been away from books for so long, I was reproved with a lethargy that dissuaded me from confronting books. Reading was a slow process and I couldn't make myself work at it. Still, as the saying goes, "a girl has to do what a girl has to" and I looked on for something to arouse my sleeping practice of reading. One day, I happened to stumble into some books (completely by chance) and a dusty Angels and Demons glowed at the far corner of the room. The title of the book enthralled me. Angels and demons! Spiritual and evil, fantasy and reality, hope and loss. My imagination tuned on some wondrous ideas of what it could possibly be about. The name of the author also called for respect: Dan Brown, author of the famous Da Vinci Code. Seemed promising enough and I opted to enter this cryptic world of Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetra. Myths, facts, discoveries, painful realizations-this book had all the elements to hold on to the reader. Dan Brown's power to infuse all these finer details into one fantastic plot encased by subtle and eternal truths was captivating. It was a formidable rival to my persistent lethargy. The story begins with the symbologist Robert Langdon getting an anonymous phone call for work. Just when he had thought it was one of those researchers vying for information, he found his eyes popping out at the fax he got. It had a picture of a symbol carved into the body of a dead man's chest. The brilliance of the ambigram was its symmetrical ingenuity and its subject. Illuminati (an anti-Christian cult supposed to have long become inactive) immediately caught the attention of the world renowned Harvard symbologist. Within a few hours he was embarked on a romantic and spine-chilling journey, accompanied by Vittoria Vetra, daughter of the man murdered by the Illuminati and also a scientist at CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire). As Langdon perceives, the versatile Vetra is just as mysterious as the journey. Together they visit the Camerlengo, enter catacombs, brainstorm symbols for hidden meanings and strive to save Vatican City a few hours away from extinction. Brown's mélange of mixing fiction with a plethora of details pulls the reader into misbelieving that all these are actually real. Imagine a whole world witnessing the gruesome deaths of cardinals and the frantic despair of a city as well as that of the Catholic Church! It seems too harsh for reality anyway. The author is definitely an erudite applier of knowledge. He reasons out from the nascent stages of the book all that is inexplicable and unreal. His lucid descriptions impress the vividness of the read. The book itself is a complete charm. At certain points of your reading, you may find yourself gobsmacked at the ethereal transcendental messages sparkling in the voice of the author through Camerlengo's words or some other medium. At another point you might feel repelled at the poignant details of murder and the scorching hatred that herald the story. At its dénouement, you will feel as if you have lost even if you have won (in extracting the meaning of the story). Its like watching television with all the History, Discovery and Movie channels jammed into one monitor --- sometimes as mystical and emotional as a fairy tale, at other times as zealous and adventurous as a superhero's comic story. Perhaps the end of the assassin does not appeal as much to the mind as the invincibility of the character. At any length, the way the two protagonists deal with this ruthless murderer is still consuming. The story is a timeless one, as any book ought to be. It captures all the elements that can be riveting even for the idlest of readers. So if you have heard from your friends and yet not entered this creation of Brown, you are definitely missing it.
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