Book review: 'Inferno'

Book: Inferno
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 461
Price: Rs750

Critics don’t have to try very hard to trash bestselling novelist Dan Brown’s books. A widely-shared piece in the The Telegraph, UK, did just that when one of its critics put down a fictional account of Brown worrying about critics. They “call his writing clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology.

They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors... They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description...”

Sadly, Brown’s latest offering, Inferno, does nothing to prove these imaginary (and real) critics wrong. This admission comes from a fan who has devoured all of Brown’s previous books — Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol. This is because the much-marketed Inferno is incredibly dull.

Inferno begins with Langdon in a hospital suffering from amnesia and in possession of a metal cylinder that references the Italian poet Dante’s poem, The Divine Comedy.

Langdon spends the rest of the novel trying to uncover the secrets of the cylinder along with Dr Sienna Brooks, a doctor with a shadowy past. As he races through Florence, Venice and finally Istanbul, a leather-clad, spiky-haired female assassin is close on his heels. If that isn’t enough, Langdon is also haunted by visions of a silver-haired woman who talks about the end being near.

Inferno’s villain is a brilliant scientist, who dies very early on in the book, but not before drawing up a master plan that threatens to destroy the world. The villain sees overpopulation as a disease and has put in place a chain of events that will release a virus that will kill millions, restoring the balance in the world.

 Inferno raises certain moral and ethical questions. Will you sacrifice a few to save many? Is the earth really able to self-purge when things get out of control? Brown connects this with the science of the Transhumanist movement whose followers believe that humanity has to take control of its evolution. There’s an interesting reference to the plague and how experts believe it was responsible for maintaining the earth’s balance and possibly gave rise to the Renaissance movement.

Unlike the previous books, Langdon appears content to take the backseat, letting Sienna do most of the legwork. The Langdon here is a far cry from the intelligent, fleet-footed and quick-witted professor in the earlier books. The clues appear too easy for someone of his stature and yet he takes his own time deciphering it.

Brown also seems to have given himself the luxury of extra pages to provide readers with a tourist guide of Florence, Venice and Turkey — each chapter starts with long descriptions of statues, paintings, poems and the like, none of which take the story forward. It’s also a bit unnerving for Langdon to suddenly start reminiscing about the history behind Dante’s works or about a particular symbol, when he has an assassin hot on his heels.

Inferno gets dull after a point and you have to force yourself to plod through it; the action passages are too few and far between. It has none of the tautness and gripping, page-turning ability of Brown’s earlier thrillers. Fans would do well to return to those works to remind themselves that this author once wrote a convincing thriller.