Inferno
~ Dan Brown
[SPOILER ALERT]
Dan Brown has been accused of writing the same novel again and again in different settings. The accusation limits to his Robert Langdon series, the latest of which was released this month with much fanfare. While the plot remains the same – Harvard symbologist Langdon running out of time to save the world and the only way to do it is to decrypt secret symbols, messages or puzzles. You do learn a lot about art history, though it is rather difficult to segregate fact from fiction. Anyway, I like the Langdon series for precisely that. I like the build-up, the use of symbols and history to solve a puzzle. However, the magic Brown created in ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has not been replicated either by ‘The Lost Symbol’ or his latest ‘Inferno’.
The story starts with Langdon waking up with a head wound and retrograde amnesia in a hospital in Florence and seeing his doctor being shot while trying to stop an assassin from entering his room. With help of the assistant doctor, he manages to escape. He finds a strange device in his jacket, which turns out to be a projector that shows an altered version of ‘The Map of Hell’ by Sandro Botticelli. The painting was inspired by Dante’s Inferno. He also has hallucinations about a woman with silver ringlets and an amulet asking him to “seek and find”. With no memory of the last two days, he tries to solve the puzzle of the altered ‘Map of Hell’. It turns out that an eminent scientist, Bertrand Zobrist, had created a plague to kill a large portion of the population thereby “saving the world” from the ills of overpopulation. Following clues related to Dante and his Divine Comedy, he has to reach the place where the plague would be released and somehow contain it. For a change, Langdon fails and in some ways so does Brown.
The debate on overpopulation, substantiated by graphics (presumably real), does present a compelling case for a scientist taking a drastic step to obliterate a good percentage of the world population. The chase and parallel stories help build up for the climax and once you reach there, the storyline just drops. You don’t feel like reading anymore, to follow up on the characters. It is just not good enough and it’s Brown’s fault as he set the standard really high with ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The Da Vinci code’ in which even the epilogue was interesting.
I guess that is a problem with series, it is really hard to keep up with the reader’s expectations. If I were to rate the book till chapter 76, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars; till chapter 100, 3 out of 5; the whole book – just 2 or may be 1-and-a-half stars. Yet, I will buy his next Robert Langdon book (I read somewhere that he has 12 great ideas for the Langdon series), and pray it holds candle to the first two books.
PS: [Not to be read if you haven’t read the book already] Till chapter 76, the build-up and the story is wonderful, though repetitions of Zobrist’s video are irritating and I wish he had just described the entire video in one go and not repeated it. But when you find out that whatever you have read so far is a farce, you feel cheated. You travel with Langdon and pray that he escapes his foes and saves the world only to realize that all of that was staged! Really!! Still, you read on hoping for a good explanation for the farce, only to be let down again. The assassin that tries to kill Langdon in the opening scene is in fact a professional who specialises in “pretending to kill people”! Really Mr Brown, I have better expectations.
~ Dan Brown
[SPOILER ALERT]
Dan Brown has been accused of writing the same novel again and again in different settings. The accusation limits to his Robert Langdon series, the latest of which was released this month with much fanfare. While the plot remains the same – Harvard symbologist Langdon running out of time to save the world and the only way to do it is to decrypt secret symbols, messages or puzzles. You do learn a lot about art history, though it is rather difficult to segregate fact from fiction. Anyway, I like the Langdon series for precisely that. I like the build-up, the use of symbols and history to solve a puzzle. However, the magic Brown created in ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has not been replicated either by ‘The Lost Symbol’ or his latest ‘Inferno’.
The story starts with Langdon waking up with a head wound and retrograde amnesia in a hospital in Florence and seeing his doctor being shot while trying to stop an assassin from entering his room. With help of the assistant doctor, he manages to escape. He finds a strange device in his jacket, which turns out to be a projector that shows an altered version of ‘The Map of Hell’ by Sandro Botticelli. The painting was inspired by Dante’s Inferno. He also has hallucinations about a woman with silver ringlets and an amulet asking him to “seek and find”. With no memory of the last two days, he tries to solve the puzzle of the altered ‘Map of Hell’. It turns out that an eminent scientist, Bertrand Zobrist, had created a plague to kill a large portion of the population thereby “saving the world” from the ills of overpopulation. Following clues related to Dante and his Divine Comedy, he has to reach the place where the plague would be released and somehow contain it. For a change, Langdon fails and in some ways so does Brown.
The debate on overpopulation, substantiated by graphics (presumably real), does present a compelling case for a scientist taking a drastic step to obliterate a good percentage of the world population. The chase and parallel stories help build up for the climax and once you reach there, the storyline just drops. You don’t feel like reading anymore, to follow up on the characters. It is just not good enough and it’s Brown’s fault as he set the standard really high with ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The Da Vinci code’ in which even the epilogue was interesting.
I guess that is a problem with series, it is really hard to keep up with the reader’s expectations. If I were to rate the book till chapter 76, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars; till chapter 100, 3 out of 5; the whole book – just 2 or may be 1-and-a-half stars. Yet, I will buy his next Robert Langdon book (I read somewhere that he has 12 great ideas for the Langdon series), and pray it holds candle to the first two books.
PS: [Not to be read if you haven’t read the book already] Till chapter 76, the build-up and the story is wonderful, though repetitions of Zobrist’s video are irritating and I wish he had just described the entire video in one go and not repeated it. But when you find out that whatever you have read so far is a farce, you feel cheated. You travel with Langdon and pray that he escapes his foes and saves the world only to realize that all of that was staged! Really!! Still, you read on hoping for a good explanation for the farce, only to be let down again. The assassin that tries to kill Langdon in the opening scene is in fact a professional who specialises in “pretending to kill people”! Really Mr Brown, I have better expectations.
