By Stuart Nulman
Let me say right off the bat … after all the hype and excitement surrounding its impending release earlier this spring, Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster book “Inferno” is not his best novel (that distinction belongs to “Angels and Demons”). However, it remains an entertaining and informative thriller that will be widely read this summer.
The book’s beginning smacks of the late Robert Ludlum’s classic “The Bourne Identity”. Protagonist Robert Langdon – the Harvard University professor of symbology from “Angels and Demons” and the mega bestseller “The Da Vinci Code” – wakes up in the middle of the night to find himself lying in a bed in a hospital room in Florence, Italy, with a gunshot wound to the back of his head. The problem is Langdon has no clue how he ended up in this hospital room, let alone thousands of miles away from his Boston home.
However, with the aid of a helpful English-born doctor at the hospital, Sienna Brooks, Langdon tries to figure out the circumstances that led him to that Florentine hospital bed. However, a device encased in a steel tube that’s sewn into the lining of his jacket starts to provide the answers he desperately seeks. It’s a mini projector that shows a painting by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli depicting a frightening scene based on “Inferno”, the final segment of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem “The Divine Comedy”.
But as Langdon and Dr. Brooks starts to unravel the clues from that painting to find out how and why he ended up in Florence, they are trailed by a hired female assassin and a secret international cabal. This ends up in a breathless, frantically–paced chase along the streets of Florence and Venice where not even the U.S. Consulate can be trusted to ensure their safety. And as Langdon begins to decipher the clues that are thrust upon him, they point to Bertrand Zobrist, a rather fanatical Transhumanist, who uses the apocalyptic verses from “The Human Comedy” to launch his dangerous mission of thinning out the world’s population by employing a manufactured plague similar to the Black Death that wiped out a portion of the European population during the 14th century.
There are plenty of plot twists and turns (and moments of true suspense) that make “Inferno” an absorbing thriller to read. And Brown uses his penchant for historical clues and symbols to unlock the mystery through the works and world of Dante to find out why he ended up in Florence in the first place. It’s also doubles as an interesting travelogue to Dante’s life and world in pre-Renaissance Italy, and the carefully crafted architecture that made Florence the hub of art and culture during the Renaissance period.
However, between the thrilling chases, unlocking of clues and historical backgrounders, there are chunks of details that sometimes slows the book’s pace until the next desperate chase or stunning revelation arises. And worst of all, after all that historical digging and nick-of-time suspense, the ending is rather anti-climactic, drawn out and quite disappointing.
If you can somehow forgive the plodding ending to “Inferno”, it can still satisfy as a summer beach read and a fascinating introduction to the world of one of Italy’s greatest writers and his world, as well as a chilling lesson to how individuals use fanaticism and world threats to fulfill their twisted missions to what they think is for the good of the future of humanity. It’s basically an interesting history lesson wrapped in an adequate mystery-thriller.
This review originally appeared in the June 22, 2013 edition of The West End Times.
