Book Review: Inferno by Dan Brown

Inferno by Dan Brown

More than 700 years ago, Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet, penned down a long narrative poem entitled “The Divine Comedy” in Italian. This poem describes his journey through hell towards paradise. It is divided into three parts – Inferno, Purgatrio, and Paradiso. The first part “Inferno” depicts his descent into hell where he had to cross nine concentric circles of hell, oozing with torment and suffering. Dan Brown’s novel Inferno illustrates an intriguing story that revolves around Dante’s poetry Inferno.

The beginning of the novel erupts into outbreak of tense action as Brown’s signature character Robert Langdon finds himself in a hospital having amnesia. Langdon, who is a professor of symbology, discovers a tiny, mysterious biometric cylinder hidden by someone inside his tweed jacket, but he recollects nothing about it whatsoever.

Before he can churn his memory to think, he realizes he is being chased by hordes of black-uniformed officers and a spiked-hair woman with a bike. Another woman from the hospital, the doctor who told him he had been shot by a bullet, helps him to escape, only to set off on a trip that takes them through the citystreets of Florence, causing them to traverse secret tunnels, old palaces, and museums to run away.

Like every novel of Brown, this one too is teeming with belfry of descriptions, mainly relating to the three cities in which the plot is crafted – Florence, Venice, and Istanbul. Langdon finds himself abruptly in Florence, where this bald woman doctor aids him to escape. Then following the clues, they take a train to Venice, where the woman leaves him and flees away when the black-uniformed officers capture them; thereupon the professor visits Istanbul.

Apart from descriptions, the book appears to be written from a comprehensive and elaborate research. In fact, some of the characters, and places in the story are not entirely fiction but real with names changed. For example, the WHO director, the secret Consortium organization, and of course, Dante’s verses.

Although it is very common for Brown’s novels to feature the themes of symbolism, history, and arts, but this book, in addition to all these themes, also contain glimpses of paranormal, which makes it slightly spooky. For example, the character of the underworld creature named “Shade,” described in the beginning of the book, is something that will send creeps down the readers’ spine, and make them want to read the book further.

Devoted to this dark energy of Shade, there is a cranky man named Bertrand Zobrist who is a genetic manipulator, obsessed to a horrific extent, about curbing the issue of overpopulation. When he is not able to convince the WHO’s director, he sets on a lone journey to create a virus. Hell breaks loose as the employees of WHO and Langdon come to know what has spawned from the infernal mind of this devil man. Zobrist releases this contagious virus in a lagoon, from where it spreads throughout the population, making people infertile. But he is no longer there to witness the aftereffects of his virus, for, he committed suicide long before the virus bag burst open inside the underground lagoon slooshing with illuminated red waters.

In one way, the entire story is Langdon’s journey of arriving at the lagoon so that he could help WHO’s team to contain and stop the virus. He follows clue after clue to step forward in this journey. But when he arrives there, he’s too late. Adding to it, the betrayal from the bald woman who posed herself as his doctor shakes him off into a whammy of delirium.

Like Brown’s other novels, this book too is a masterpiece rolled out of the enigmatic lair of his brain. Deceptions at every step; play of words, symbols, and names; stories behind antique artifacts; squabbles of endless twists; there’s just too much to engross the attention.

The novel demonstrates how no one could have imagined that Zobrist, a Dante frantic would use his poem in such a twisty way, molding it for his own dark-ish agendas. Not only he misinterpreted Dante’s poem, but also modified Italian painter Botticelli’s famous painting “La Mappa dell'Inferno,” also called “The Map of Hell,” which was based on Dante’s Inferno. 

In a video he made for people to watch, he outlined no clues except for a set of Dante’s verses which offered little hints to Langdon about where the virus bag was hidden in the first place.

And even though he failed in his attempt, even though he was behind time, he didn’t succumb to inaction in the times of crisis, because, as Brown quoted in the book, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

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