A Review of Dan Brown's 'Inferno'

Inferno by Dan Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In his latest release ‘Inferno’, Dan Brown continues the high-voltage, action-packed drama in the Italian theatre with the famous Harvard symbolist Prof. Robert Langdon. After the relatively demure ‘Lost Symbol’, Inferno starts with action from the word go. The famous Italian poet, Dante Alighieri's magnum opus ‘Divine Comedy’ forms the pivotal point for most of the plot. Dan Brown conjures a world of an imminent bio-terrorism attack intermingled with the rich Italian art history and literature.  The action starts at the lovely Italian city of Florence which is incidentally the birth-place of Dante, then shifts to 'The City on Water', Venice and finally culminates at the former capital of Turkey, Istanbul, taking the reader on a roller-coaster ride full of twists and turns and introducing the reader to the rich heritage and the architectural marvels of the former Italian city-states and Istanbul.
The narrative is intriguing but it gets a tad cumbersome at times with the barrage of details about the sites which might be attractive to a connoisseur of art and history but equally depressing to the others. The plot is riveting and the first scene feels like straight from some Hollywood action flick. Robert Langdon wakes up in an unknown hospital and is in a disoriented state. To his surprise he finds himself in Florence with no memory as to how he got there. Apparently he is in a state of amnesia due to some injury to his head. Before he gets any more answers, a female fatale comes into the scene heading for Langdon’s room in an apparent attempt to shoot him. One of the doctor’s present in the room apparently gets shot, however his other doctor, a blonde by the name of Miss Syena Brooks saves the day as she helps Langdon to his feet and they covertly race past the assassin and make a dash for their lives. Miss Syena Brooks, who, as Langdon discovers later, is a child genius with an IQ of 208, becomes a constant companion of Langdon throughout the plot. Robert finds a biohazard cylinder in his jacket. He opens the cylinder and finds a medieval bone cylinder fitted with a hi-tech projector that projects a modified version of Botticelli's Map of Hell. Suddenly he finds mysterious agents dressed in black with high tech gear coming for him. To his utter dismay, even the Government officials whom he trusted seem to be co-conspirators in this ploy. For the most part of the plot, Langdon and Sienna are on the run, evading the local authorities and the agents of the unknown enemy at their tail; trying to decipher the message in Botticelli's Map of Hell. As the plot progresses, further startling revelations follows which makes Langdon’s world turn upside down. The ones he considered to be his enemies turn out to be the good ones and his trusted ally in all this, Miss Syena Brooks seems to be a shady figure. Towards the end, they all dash for the Turkish city of Istanbul, where East meets West, in an attempt to stall the evil designs of Bertrand Zobrist, who wants to save mankind from extinction due to over-population, by dispersion of a deadly virus. What happens next is for the readers delight!
The climax is somewhat less conclusive if we take into account the previous books in the series. However, what must be appreciated is the author’s ingenuity in depicting such an important topic as ‘Population Explosion’ and its catastrophic fall-outs that seems to threaten our very existence and presenting it in an interesting way that will perhaps create more awareness in the world. In Dante’s words, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."


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