Is it formula writing? Is it possible to have a formula when writing a first novel? The best way to answer that is to look at Brown’s work in total. His next novel would be a departure from Digital Fortress.
CHAPTER EIGHT
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ANGELS AND DEMONS
Science and religion was a very large part of my life from grade school all the way through college and I wanted to make them harmonious on a personal level.
DAN BROWN
Once Digital Fortress had been sold to Pocket Books in 1996, Brown went full tilt into researching his next novel, Angels & Demons. It would be a full 18 months before his first novel hit the shelves and all that time he was working on the new one, even though he didn’t yet have his main theme.
‘Sometime after completing Digital Fortress, I had several other ideas in development but hadn’t yet decided on a direction,’ Brown explained. ‘I had enjoyed writing about the NSA, computers, technology and, of course, “secrets”. I had read about CERN – Conseil European pour la Recherche Nucleaire – which is the world’s largest scientific research facility.’
The idea of Europe was certainly an interesting one to Brown. As he had one character saying in the finished version: ‘Most Americans do not see Europe as the world leader in scientific research. They see us as nothing but a quaint shopping district – an odd perception if you consider the nationalities of men like Einstein, Galileo and Newton.’
Brown and Blythe travelled to Rome and it was on this trip that he got his big idea for novel number two. It was an off-the-cuff remark by a tour guide that switched the light bulb on. ‘We were beneath Vatican City touring a tunnel called Il Passetto – a concealed passageway used by the early Popes to escape in event of enemy attack,’ said Brown. ‘It runs from the Vatican to Castle Saint Angelo. According to the tour guide, one of the Vatican’s most feared ancient enemies was a group of early scientists who had vowed revenge against the Vatican for crimes against scientists like Galileo and Copernicus. History had called them many things – the enlightened ones, the Illuminati, the Cult of Galileo.’
Brown was fascinated by the idea of the Illuminati and when the guide said that some people believed the Illuminati were still active and had strong political influence around the world today, despite the fact that most scholars believed they were long gone, the big idea for the new novel suddenly became clear. Brown decided there and then to base the book on the fact that the Illuminati were still very much alive in the shadows and had a sinister plan to bring down the Catholic Church.
Brown and Blythe took two trips to Rome for Brown to get what he needed for the novel. On the first one they walked for miles and took hundreds of photos, ‘and explored the city using all kinds of guidebooks, maps and tours.’
Researching religion, architecture and art were the stuff of dreams to Brown and very exciting. He was lucky that Blythe also found the subjects enthralling. ‘Once I started to look at artwork for inclusion in the story, I began to focus on particular artists,’ Brown recalled. ‘I knew Gianlorenzo Bernini had had problems with the Church. For example, his sculpture The Ecstasy of St Teresa, which I mention in the book, had been controversial.’
This controversy was the trigger for Brown to use Bernini in the book. He’d studied the artist in Spain and gained a lot of knowledge about the man’s work. ‘I was intrigued by the concept that Bernini’s artwork might contain hidden messages; I learnt in art history classes that artists like Bernini, when commissioned to create religious art that may have been contrary to their own beliefs, often placed second levels of meaning in their art.’
‘Langdon looked up at the towering monuments and felt totally disorientated. Two pyramids, each with a shining elliptical medallion. They were about as un-Christian as sculpture could get. The pyramids, the stars above, the signs of the Zodiac. All interior adornments are those of Gianlorenzo Bernini.’ (Angels & Demons)
On their second trip, Brown and Blythe were accompanied by an art expert friend who had ties to the Vatican, and who helped them gain access to places that most people wouldn’t see. ‘The Vatican has a staggering collection of Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo, Raphael and Bernini,’ Brown said. ‘We spent a week in Rome, and our contact facilitated our gaining special access to the unclassified sections of the Vatican archives, as well as our seeing the Pope, both at a mass and in his audience hall.’[76]
In the book Brown goes into detail about the secret Vatican archives but he never actually saw them himself. According to Brown, only three Americans have managed to gain access to these secure and priceless collections of antiquities and documents, and he was not one of them. ‘I was allowed inside the Vatican library and the Vatican archives, but not the Vatican secret archives.’[77] As Brown told the same interviewer, ‘Secrets, I think, interest everybody and the concept of secret societies – especially after I visited the Vatican – just really captured my imagination.’ [78]
Brown has said that he’d read that there are four miles of shelves in the Vatican secret archives, and that he ‘became captivated by the prospect of what might be kept down there.’ He tried many times to petition the Vatican to gain access but was always refused. Still, there were other unusual areas he could visit. ‘Our contact there generously arranged for us to see several restricted areas of the Vatican, including the Necropolis (the city of the dead buried beneath the Vatican), St Peter’s actual crypt (which we learned is not where most people think it is), and some perilous sections of the roof high above the Basilica; all of which featured in Angels & Demons.’[79]
After the European trips Brown had two main ideas, the Illuminati and the research he’d already started gathering on CERN. Located in Switzerland, CERN employs more than 3,000 scientists from around the world. When Brown began researching it, he discovered that they were working on antimatter, which has potential as a renewable energy source. But antimatter has its darker side. Its volatility and massive energy release mean it could also be used as a weapon of mass destruction. This dichotomy fascinated Brown. ‘This science could be used for good or evil; to power the world or create a deadly weapon. I thought this would make a good plot element for a novel.’[80]
As Brown looked into the Illuminati, he was stunned by some of the things he discovered. ‘I read conspiracy theories … that included infiltration of the British Parliament and US Treasury, secret involvement with the Masons, affiliation with covert satanic cults, a plan for a New World Order, and even the resurgence of their ancient pact to destroy Vatican City.’ He also found there was a huge amount of what he calls ‘misinformation’: ‘Some theorists claim the plethora of information is actually generated by the Illuminati themselves in an effort to discredit any factual information that may have surfaced. This concealment tactic – known as “data-sowing” – is often employed by US intelligence agencies.’[81]
But who were the original Illuminati? Brown describes them as enlightened early men of science, such as Galileo, who were expelled from Rome by the Vatican because they adhered to science rather than the accepted beliefs of religion. ‘The Illuminati fled and went into hiding in Bavaria where they began mixing with other refugee groups fleeing the Catholic purges – mystics, alchemists, scientists, occultists, Muslims, Jews. From this mixing pot, new Illuminati emerged. A darker Illuminati. A deeply anti-Christian Illuminati.’
According to Brown, the Illuminati became very powerful by infiltrating powerful organisations across the world, ‘employing mysterious rites, retaining deadly secrecy, and vowing someday to rise again and take revenge on the Catholic Church. Angels & Demons is a thriller about the Illuminati’s long-awaited resurgence and vengeance against their oppressors.’ And in the middle of this is Robert Langdon who has to figure everything out.[82]
So Brown realised that he had the makings of a thriller, not only with antimatter and its possibility for good or evil but also with science versus religion. His challenge was how to combine the two. He had grown up in
an atmosphere where both lived in harmony. His father was a mathematician and his mother was a church organist. He had studied science in school but also gone to church camp. At college, he had completed a cosmology course that included a section on Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, and the Vatican Inquisition against science.
‘Science and religion seem to be two different languages attempting to tell the same story, yet the battle between them has been raging for centuries and continues today,’ said Brown, referring to the debate over whether to teach Creationism or Darwinism in schools. ‘We live in an exciting era, though, because for the first time in human history, the line between science and religion is starting to blur. Particle physicists exploring the subatomic level are suddenly witnessing an interconnectivity of all things and having religious experiences… Buddhist monks are reading physics books and learning about experiments that confirm what they have believed in their hearts for centuries and have been unable to quantify.’[83]
Sensing he’d stumbled across something big, Brown began to dig deeper. At first he turned to the internet for his research, posting questions and comments to Usenet groups. ‘The Freedom of Information Act, of course, is a great resource, primarily because it can lead to specific individuals who are knowledgeable in a given field and sometimes are willing to talk about it,’ Brown said of his research. ‘In many cases, understandably, these contacts prefer to remain nameless, but sometimes depending on what they’ve told you, they like being acknowledged in the book.
‘Occasionally, research is simply a matter of finding the proper printed resource. For example, the detailed description in Angels & Demons depicting the intimate ritual of Vatican conclave – the threaded necklace of ballots… the mixing of chemicals… the burning of the ballots – much of that was from a book published on Harvard University Press by a Jesuit scholar who had interviewed more than a hundred cardinals, which is obviously something I never would have had the time or connections to do.’[84]
The books Brown read included The Quark and the Jaguar, The Tao of Physics, The God Particle and The Physics of Immortality, among many others. To his surprise he discovered that science and religion were working in common areas. ‘The grey area that interested me was the ongoing battle between science and religion, and the faint hope of reconciliation between the two,’ he said. ‘This was my “big idea” and my “grey area”. I thought I had hit on something that really would keep my attention for the next two years.’[85]
Around this time, the editor at Pocket Books who had brought Brown to the publisher and backed him left the company, leaving Brown in a state of flux. He had become a writer without an editor championing his book inside a big company. However, Brown simply cracked on with what he was doing, relying on Blythe to be his sounding board as well as his research partner.
A new editor, Jason Kaufman, came on board with the publisher shortly after the old one left. ‘A month after he had started working at the Simon & Schuster imprint, a higher-up made him responsible for overseeing the two books Brown was contractually obligated to write for the publisher.’[86]
The book has several ambigrams within its pages and the premise of the book is built around an ambigram of the word Illuminati. Brown finds them fascinating. ‘Ambigrams can be very unnerving when you first see them, and almost everyone who sees the ambigram on the novel’s cover invariably stands there for several minutes rotating the book over and over, perplexed.’[87] Eventually he would get his new editor to include an ambigram on the cover of the book, although only first editions had it.
With Angels & Demons Brown made a few key departures – he called them ‘advances’ – from Digital Fortress. The first of these was the idea of writing a thriller that was also an academic lecture. He wanted to write a book that he would love to read himself. ‘The kind of books I enjoy are those in which you learn,’ he said. ‘My hope was that readers would be entertained and also learn enough to want to use the book as a point of departure for more reading.’ As he explored his main subjects further, he found items that he thought readers would love to know about. ‘Rome was a location that allowed me to immerse myself in the history of religion, art, and architecture.’
When Brown visited the Pantheon in Rome, the docent told him about the building’s history. This is reflected in the humorous scene in the book where Robert Langdon is desperately searching for the killer while a zealous cardinal reels off facts and figures about the building: ‘Langdon’s progress around his side of the Pantheon was being hampered somewhat by the guide on his heels, now continuing his tireless narration as Langdon prepared to check the final alcove.’
Hidden information and secret societies feature prominently in all of Brown’s work. In Angels & Demons he was honing his ability to put them at the very heart of his narrative. ‘For example, the design of the Great Seal on the US dollar bill includes an illustration of a pyramid – an object which arguably has nothing to do with American history,’ Brown explained. In the Angels & Demons section of his witness statement Brown said the pyramid was, ‘actually an Egyptian occult symbol representing a convergence upward toward the ultimate source of illumination: in this case, an all-seeing eye. The eye inside the triangle is a pagan symbol adopted by the Illuminati to signify the brotherhood’s ability to infiltrate and watch all things. In addition, the triangle (Greek Delta) is the scientific symbol for change.’
Brown’s fascination with secret societies comes from growing up in New England, where he was influenced by the clandestine clubs of Ivy League universities, Masonic lodges and so on. He recalled that he saw ‘New England as having a long tradition of elite private clubs, fraternities, and secrecy.’ He had friends at Harvard who were members of a secret finals club and he also knew about the Skull & Bones club at Yale. ‘In the town where I grew up, there was a Masonic lodge, and nobody could (or would) tell me what happened behind those closed doors. All of this secrecy captivated me as a young man.’[88]
Writing about secret societies and material keeps Brown interested in the project. ‘Because a novel can take upwards of a year to write, I need to be constantly learning as I write, or I lose interest,’ he said. ‘Researching and writing about secretive topics helps remind me how much fun it is to “spy” into unseen worlds and it motivates me to try to give the reader that same experience. My goal is always to make the characters and plot so engaging that readers don’t realise how much they are learning along the way.’[89]
But the novel is not a religious book. It is quite simply ‘a chase and a love story’. The action takes place inside the Vatican and Brown believes that ‘most people understand that an organisation as old and powerful as the Vatican could not possibly have risen to power without acquiring a few skeletons in their closets.’ But perhaps the reason why the novel raised eyebrows in certain circles is because it ‘opens some Vatican closets most people don’t even know exist.’[90]
As with Digital Fortress, codes and treasure hunts feature prominently. In the first novel it was a straight binary code that had to be cracked but in the second Brown put the clues in a series of poems or riddles, which he saw as ‘useful tools for releasing information and moving the plot to the next stage.’
‘I accomplished this by delivering the code in short snippets of verse, which enables the reader a chance to stay one step ahead of Langdon,’ explained Brown. ‘Langdon, as a teacher, symbologist and art historian, satisfies dual prerequisites for my hero – that of being a credible teacher and also of being knowledgeable enough to decipher the clues in the artistic treasure hunts I create.’
Brown has said that he feels that Angels & Demons has a superior plot and is better written than Digital Fortress. ‘I wanted every single chapter to compel the reader to turn to the next page. I was taught that efficiency of words is the way an author respects his readers’ time, and so I trimmed the novel heavily while I was writing.’[91]
To build pace and tension he compressed the plot into a 24-hour time span. ‘I trie
d to keep the reader abreast of where the characters were physically, at all times. That seems to help the reader’s feeling that he is right there the entire time. In addition, I tried to end every chapter with a cliffhanger.’
All five of Brown’s novels are written to a similar style or structure. He believes it is this formula that makes his books so compelling for his readers. Essentially, his books have a hero who is pulled out of their routine and put into unfamiliar and dangerous situations that they don’t understand. Each of his books have very strong female characters who interact with the male character to create romance and implied sexuality. Travel, interesting locations and the countdown all add to the story. ‘I think that it is not so much what I write which is compelling but how I say it,’ Brown said. ‘I must admit, however, that I did not realise this until my first three novels became huge bestsellers after The Da Vinci Code.’
The story of Angels & Demons revolves around the main character of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon as he tries to stop the Illuminati from destroying Vatican City with antimatter. The book begins with Robert Langdon getting a fax from CERN director Maximilian Kohler that shows the ambigram of the Illuminati branded into a dead man’s chest. This man is, or was, Leonardo Vetra, one of the top and most respected physicists at CERN. In addition, one of Vetra’s eyes is missing.
Kohler has discovered the body but not called the police. Instead he contacts Langdon and has him flown over to authenticate the symbol, which he does. The meaning of this is that the Illuminati, a long extinct secret society, is operating again. But things are more serious than that. Kohler has called in Vetra’s daughter, the beautiful Vittoria, who takes them down to the lab where she and her father were working. They discover that a canister of antimatter has been stolen. Because of its volatile nature the antimatter is suspended inside the canister in a high vacuum by a magnetic field, which ensures it cannot come in contact with matter and unleash its tremendous destructive power. The canister is maintained by electricity at CERN but if it is taken away its backup battery lasts only 24 hours. When the battery fails, the antimatter will fall, touch the base of the canister and explode.
The Dan Brown Enigma Page 7