Inferno

Inferno – Dan Brown

Robert Langdon is back to save the world again, although he doesn’t quite know what the problem is, where he is, or how to figure out. Suffering from amnesia that has taken away the past few days of his life, Langdon must make hasty decisions about where to go and who to trust. Dr. Sienna Brooks helps Langdon out of the hospital and on a dizzying race through Florence, but for how smart she is, she does not offer many answers about their situation. Who are the soldiers in black chasing them around the city? Is Langdon’s own government trying to kill him? What does this mysterious plague do and how can it be stopped? As Langdon and Brooks follow a trail through Florence that seems to parallel Dante’s Divine Comedy, they begin to wonder if the mad genius who laid down the path was really trying to create hell on Earth.

As always, Dan Brown writes a fast-paced novel that raises questions until the very last page. With short chapters that never break into double-digit page lengths, the book moves as fast as the narration, jumping between scenes, revelations, and high-speed chases at every turn of the page. And as always, Brown finds a way to take a deeply divided issue and make it gray. Brown creates an indisputable villain, but the only reason he is the villain is because of the methods he chooses, not necessarily his end goal. In “Inferno,” Brown changes position so many times that it is hard to get clarity on who can be trusted, what is happening, and how to proceed, which is not exactly a bad thing. Sometimes, to face unthinkable moral questions, everything has to be made unfamiliar so that the usual black and white cannot define the issue.

I am a huge fan of Dan Brown because his books provide edutainment. Every time you read a Brown book, you learn something about some piece of art, some obscure symbol, or some language puzzle, and it is always combined with a crisis. However, I felt like “Inferno” was more of an art history lecture than a novel. It was hard for me to keep up with the storyline because he introduced a different piece of art or architecture every other paragraph, so when plot points finally began twisting beyond recognition, it took me a while to figure it out. In general, this is a classic Dan Brown book, and if you like Dan Brown, you need to read it. Personally, I think it would have been better to release the book as an app so I could see everything he was telling me about. That way, I wouldn’t have gotten so caught up in the details of angles and colors and instead focused more on which team I am rooting for and why.