Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: Doubleday
Rating: WARTY!
There is a veritable butt-load of novels titled Inferno or with that word in the title. I feel bad for all those other writers now someone of Dan Brown's attention-grabbing prowess has usurped the title!
I liked Brown's 2000 Angels & Demons, mostly for the beauty and creativity of the artwork on the ambigrams, although the adventure wasn't bad. I bought the hardback because of this - of wanting a lasting quality copy of such an artistic set. Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code was especially enjoyable for its fearless slamming of the risible Catholic church, and his 2009 The Lost Symbol was amusing in how seriously it took the bizarre cult of masonry, but otherwise that one was totally unremarkable. Now it's time to welcome you to Dante Brown's Inferno! Unfortunately for me as a reader, this one is his worst yet and it crashed and burned long before the ending
So he's fired up his Inferno, returning to his original setting of Italia (Italy), but this time set in Firenze (Florence), not in Roma (Rome). Why did I employ the seemingly pretentious naming? I ask Dante Brown this same question. Why use the Italian words for Il Duomo, and Il Davide, for example, but persistently use 'Florence' for the name of the city? How provincial and insular are we that we can’t use the names for these places which the locals themselves use - especially a gorgeously evocative name like Firenze? That's so much more in line with the rather clichéd fiery Italian ethos than is the limp 'Florence'! Must we impose English upon the entire world because we can? If Brown is going to use Florence, then why not 'David' instead of Il Davide? Why not 'cathedral' instead of 'Il Duomo'?
That's more than just a writing question, because the name 'Duomo' suggests 'dome' (at least to me to does!) and the only cathedral with a significant dome in all of Italy is the one in Firenze, so perhaps it’s the only cathedral deserving of the title 'Il Duomo'? Note that the Italian word for dome actually is Duomo (when used in the sense of a cupola - which also means dome! lol!). But I digress….
So, this is your standard Robert Langdon pell-mell mystery, with lots of pell-mell and little mystery. To those who started out by thinking that if it was anything like his previous outings, it would be acceptable for getting lost in for a mindless few hours, let me allow Power to answer with a portion of their lyric from Can You Save me? the theme song for the TV show Covert Affairs: "They were wrong. They were wrong. They were wrong. They were wrong. They were wrong, wrong, wrong...".
This outing, Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital with no memory of what's happened for the last couple (or cupola!) of days. A female assassin tries to shoot him in his hospital bed (a painful place to be shot), and he's helped to escape by his doctor - who happens to be a really attractive woman who speaks English - because she is. Neither of them think for a minute of going to the police. That may be because the police never thought of going to them - I mean, Langdon was shot in the head (almost - the bullet grazed his scalp) and yet there isn't a single cop in evidence, either asking for evidence or guarding his room?! Amateur!
Soon the inevitable and frantic Brownian motion begins as Langdon and his standard side-kick chick run through Firenze trying to resolve clues before he's killed by mysterious, unknown and secret-society-belonging entities. So, in short, exactly the same story over again for the fourth time, but now with new, unimproved, plug-ins.
One thing I learned from this novel is that Brown can't count - or if he can, he has a poor way of finding what he seeks. Langdon's first big clue comes from a mixed-up version of The map of the Hell or La mappa dell'Inferno by Sandro Botticelli:
This painting (or rather Langdon's laser image of it) reveals the initials: CATROVACER. These letters represent the ten steps in the funnel down to hell, each initial referring to one of the levels, but Brown says the seventh should be the first. This would give us: ACERCATROV, which is wrong, because he wants it to turn out to be CERCA TROVA, literally meaning seek-find. He says the seventh is the first, but in his illustration, he draws the line beneath the seventh, making it the last. Only by doing the opposite of what he claims, and putting the A last instead of first, can he get his two words correctly!
So begins the highly improbable and immensely luck-bestowed and coincidence-favored chase through Firenze, with Doctor Sienna, the heroic skirt, nudging Langdon all the time, as though she has her own agenda to get him to solve the puzzle for her. I was highly suspicious of her, seriously tempted into thinking that she was a villain, as evidenced by the way she very effectively leads him away from seeking help from the police. In fact, I was also starting to think that she betrayed him back at the borrowed apartment in which she was staying. I thought that she used her absence (seeking clothes for him next door) to call in her own people before the consulate could send help to him. But that was just a wild guess. In counterpoint to her, I rather like the assassin woman, Vayentha! This seems to be my fate: that I like a minor character or a villain better than I like the main protagonist(s) in a novel! That love affair went nowhere because Vayentha turned out to be a complete waste of time.
However, the real problem is that this novel turned out to be unspeakably boring - far more so than The Lost Symbol. Inferno is, in the end, nothing but a truly tedious travel guide to Firenze, rendered in excruciating detail at the daylight-robbery expense of pace. As if that wasn't bad enough to begin with, then it became a truly tedious travel guide to Venezia (Venice). I'm serious. Once Brown started rambling for page after page about the entire history of Venice I called "Check please" and was outta there. I quit the novel unfinished because paying that price of tedium was far to high for me for what I was getting in terms of interesting story and cool mysteries - of which there was really none.
It wasn't as though he simply mentioned some interesting highlights in passing. That would be one thing and would have made a good story that much richer. No. It was that he quite literally halted the story dead and droned on for page after page about the ancient history of the city and it bored the bored the pants off me. It's nowhere near as diverting as his first two Langdon outings, and is even worse than his third. I think after Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, Dante Brown has simply lost his mojo. He has nothing new to offer and can only continue as a writer by retreading previous stories with a few details changed, hoping that we won't notice. Well I did notice. I noticed how truly warty this novel was.
