Dan Brown's "Inferno": Bleeayahhhh...

It looks like Robert Langdon is at it again. The Harvard professor of symbology (and, apparently, art history [and medieval literature, too]) awakens to find himself in an Italian hospital, a bullet wound in his scalp, and two days missing from his memory. Rattling around his addled brain are a sense of foreboding and a snippet of memory of a beautiful woman with silver hair. When a black-clad assassin bursts into the hospital room and murders a doctor before his eyes, he escapes into the night with another doctor - a beautiful bald-headed English polyglot genius - only to realize he's in his favorite city in the whole wide world, Florence. Firenze. Whatever.

A hidden pocket in his Harris Tweed jacket yields a strange device that projects an image of Botticelli's La Mappa dell'Inferno, a map of Hell as envisioned by Dante. What follows next should be no surprise to those who devoured Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and The Lost Symbol. I mean it: no surprise...

The image has been subtly altered to... well, it's Dan Brown and Robert Langdon, so of course it's been subtly altered to provide clues to... who knows? We know: an evil genius has set some arcane plan in motion, a plan that only Langdon and his latest sexy sidekick, Sienna, can prevent. Maybe. Maybe not.



As Bob and Sienna gallivant across Florence (and then Venice, and then... somewhere else) readers are treated to a travelogue worthy of a Guide Michelin, about a semester's worth of college-level art history and an in-depth dissertation on the ins and outs (and overs, unders, arounds and throughs) of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, especially the section on Dante's passage through Hell. Along the way they're pursued by a gang of military types in black uniforms and the mysterious spiky-haired assassin, and Langdon captures a glimpse of the statuesque silver-haired beauty of his dream, held captive by the black-clad goons.

Things are not always as they seem, however, as Langdon will eventually learn...

The fourth book in the Robert Langdon series, Inferno finds the urbane professor and his Harris Tweed back in Europe (sans his beloved Mickey Mouse watch, though). Once again, the brilliant doctor displays his encyclopedic knowledge of a complex, arcane topic(who knew he was an expert on Dante's Divine Comedy?) as he races against the clock and a crew of villains who will stop at nothing to prevent him from saving the world. Maybe... maybe not.

In case you weren't aware (your name must be van Winkle, right?), Brown thundered onto the (semi-)literary stage a few years ago with The Da Vinci Code, the moderately entertaining thriller that capitalized on raising puzzle-solving to an art form of sorts. Fans salivating after more Langdon swarmed bookstores looking for Brown's previous (albeit inferior) novel Angels and Demons, and did the same with his more recent The Lost Symbol (I skipped that one, myself). That just goes to prove that a lot of people's taste is all in their mouths.

I read the thing, the whole 480 pages (523 in the ePub version). I darned near quit at one point. As I got closer to the end, I was "turning pages" faster and faster - but only because I was skipping over Brown's enormous piles of filler. The only reason I finished is that some people think you can't write a review of a book you haven't finished. So I did.

This is one of the most overblown books I've choked down in years. Brown peaked in The Da Vinci Code at something slightly above average, but this is not even at the level of his ridiculous Angels and Demons with its infamous helicopter-door-as-parachute scene. To call this a thriller, however, is an insult to the genre. It's about as thrilling as a Berenstain Bears book (no offense meant to the Berenstain family). Throughout much of the book, more page space is given to loving descriptions of buildings and art than to action, as Langdon meanders about the Italian cityscape it becomes ever more obvious that Brown is more interested in a travelogue than in a thriller. Airline pilots often say their job is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror - reading Inferno replaces the terror with more boredom.

What's perhaps most disturbing about Inferno is that the plot twists seem inserted almost as afterthoughts, and are about as believable as an email from a Nigerian prince. Plot twists are one of the essential elements to making a thriller thrilling. Not so much here.  If you want a neck-wrenching plot twist that is supported by the plot, then look to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. If you want a not-particularly-thrilling novel that's more concerned with art and architecture than with suspense, go for Inferno. I know which author I'll be watching for her next book.