Book Review: Inferno by Dan Brown

Title: Inferno

Author: Dan Brown

Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

Publisher: Doubleday

"Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in a hospital in the middle of the night. Disoriented and suffering from a head wound, he recalls nothing of the last thirty-six hours, including how he got there...or the origin of the macabre object that his doctors discover hidden in his belongings.

 Langdon's world soon erupts into chaos, and he finds himself on the run in Florence with a stoic young woman, Sienna Brooks, whose clever maneuvering saves his life. Langdon quickly realizes that he is in possession of a series of disturbing codes created by a brilliant scientist--a genius whose obsession with the end of the world is matched only by his passion for one of the most influential masterpieces ever written--Dante Alighieri's dark epic poem 'The Inferno'.

Racing through such  timeless locations as the Palazzo Vecchio, the Boboli Gardens, and the Duomo, Langdon and Brooks discover a network of hidden passageways and ancient secrets, as well as a terrifying new scientific paradigm that will be used either to vastly improve the quality of life on earth...or to devastate it.

In his most compelling and thought-provoking novel to date, Dan Brown has raised the bar yet again. Inferno is a sumptuously entertaining read--a novel that will captivate readers with the beauty of classical Italian art, history, and literature...while also posing provocative questions about the role of cutting-edge science in our future."

Dan Brown is without a doubt the most notorious thriller writer of this generation. I mean, why wouldn't he be? He's the author of the controversial The Da Vinci Code that suggests Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and that the Catholic Church has been protecting this "secret" for centuries and would go to great lengths for it to remain as such, including murder. This created a backlash and generated publicity that has catapulted his previous and subsequent books to the top of bestseller lists, spawned two Hollywood blockbuster movies, and made him filthy rich. 

His latest novel, Inferno, doesn't really deviate much from his novels that feature Harvard professor Robert Langdon as the protagonist. Actually, if you've read these novels, you start to notice a formula: Robert Langdon goes to a far-off location faced with the task of unraveling a mysterious code or riddle that takes him to museums, monuments, and a network of hidden passages and tunnels within the city. All this while accompanied by a young, attractive female sidekick, as they are being chased around by a lunatic or by authorities, or pressured by time to save the world from danger before its too late.

Inferno follows this exact formula. Dan Brown also seems hell-bent on having this one turned into a blockbuster film--he carefully chooses three picturesque cities (Florence, Venice, and Istanbul) as the setting for the novel, and includes quite a number of extended chase scenes that, as I was reading them, I imagined would look good on the big screen (the big chase scene in Istanbul, though slightly cliched, got my heart racing). It looks like Dan Brown is getting what he wanted--Inferno's movie adaptation is already being planned for a 2015 release date. Unfortunately for him though, the producers seem to have abandoned previous plans for a The Lost Symbol movie adaptation in favor of this one. 

Despite claims of inaccuracies in his novels as well as criticisms of his writing style (critics say he's addicted to adjectives), I would say that Inferno is still an absolute page-turner. With Inferno, I am reminded of why I still read Dan Brown's novels despite these shortcomings. Inferno will have your heart pounding early on the novel, and will keep you hanging on to the edge of your seats up until the last few chapters with surprising, unexpected twists that haven't been used in previous Dan Brown books. That huge revelation in the latter part definitely blew me away. The parts of the novel with the flashbacks and long, encyclopedia-like paragraphs where the characters explain historical facts and the like give readers a temporary break from all the action and suspense. Unlike the last few Dan Brown novels, Inferno gives a bit more importance to the story rather than to the "groundbreaking" revelations or facts presented to the readers, so this actually feels more of a fiction novel than anything.

However, there are parts of the book that seemed repetitive and unnecessary. Details or facts already explained to a character in a previous chapter are explained yet again in a later chapter, this time to another character. Do the readers really need to read about it again and again? Dan Brown also has the tendency of over-describing some of the settings in the novel which makes things more confusing since some descriptions do not really contribute to the overall advancement of the story. I wish he'd just stick to what is really necessary--imagining nonfictional places as you read about them is certainly much more difficult than imagining fictional ones, since you are forced to imagine how the place actually looks like, now how you want it to look like. I had to use the help of everyone's good friend Google just so I could picture these nonfictional works of art and locations more easily. 

While the past few years have already taught us not to immediately believe or think too much of what Dan Brown's novels say (they are works of fiction, after all), Inferno is still quite thought-provoking. Inferno is definitely a book for those who are looking for an entertaining, page-turning thriller, and it surely does not disappoint in that aspect. I'm now excitedly looking forward to what any future Dan Brown thrillers have in store.