Book Review - Inferno by Dan Brown

All aboard!  This is the Dan Brown express train, bringing more details, more descriptions, and more running than you could possibly imagine in a text.  Please keep your hands and feet inside the car, for we will be zipping along at speeds that will rip your face off, tear at limbs, and impede sight.  This word train will be flying through the streets of Florence, barreling down hallways of extravagant statues, falling through century old canvases, and zooming across the waterways of the lovely Venice.  Please try not to blink or you could miss something—not a plot point, of course, but maybe some historical fact you didn't know.

I'd like you to meet Dante...do me a favor, try not to stare at his nose. He hates that.

STORY:

Robert Langdon awakes in a hospital bed with no recollection of how or why he's there.  Before he can get up to relieve himself, he'll already be shot at, dragged through a hospital, and pushed down a stairwell, until finally escaping with a pretty young girl on the streets of Florence.  With no memory and no clothes, it's up to him and a super intelligent young woman to decode Dante's Inferno to save humanity from a mad man.  Crazy detailed art lessons and history ensues.

"Yep. I thought so--definitely more details than the human brain can store."

THOUGHTS:

In Dan Brown fashion, Inferno's entire timeline is set within a couple of days, yet the story seemed to run along forever.  As dire as Robert Langdon would have you believe the situation is, he still has time to stop mid-flight and give you intricate details of every statue, painting, door, building, waterway, underground cistern, secret passage, speech, and…well, you get the idea.  The whole "hurry-the-world-is-ending" thing makes no sense when you stop every other paragraph to give a museum tour guide explanation to anything you're passing.  If Dan Brown cut 100 pages or more, and just focused on the task at hand, the book would have resembled a thriller, instead of the art history tomb it has become.

"Fantastic Mr. Hanks. A few more shots like this and we could use these scenes 

in any upcoming Dan Brown movie."

Now, even though I'm having a little fun with his latest novel, doesn't mean I don't respect Dan Brown for writing one of the most controversial and wide-read books in the world.  The Da Vinci code is apparently still trying to be deciphered by other books, TV specials, and any Joe Blow who thinks he knows something about God, the Bible, or Leonardo.  So obviously, Dan Brown must be given credit where credit is due: good job Mr. Brown.  There, now that that's out of the way, the real question is this: can the same formula used in the Da Vinci Code continue to hold your interest again and again?

In the Da Vinci Code you were whisked away for a couple of days with Langdon and a beautiful woman, trying to decipher codes and stop evil.  Sound familiar?  The difference between that story and this one is the controversy of Jesus having a bloodline.  That's what made the Da Vinci Code refreshing and the Catholic Church go bananas.  That amazing controversy is missing here.  Yes, there is a moral dilemma, but it's nothing we haven't heard before, and nothing that'll make a religious, health or government organization, film documentaries until we're blue in the face.  So what you're left with is an art history book that would be great map for marathon runners.

"Don't move--don't even breathe. We'll blend in and they'll never see us."

Speaking of marathons, have you ever watched a marathon on TV, or say a bicycle race of some sort?  If you have, then you already know the feeling you'll get while reading Inferno.  In the beginning of the race (just like in the novel) everything looks and feels exciting, because you have no idea where the road is heading.  Then the runners are off and they stick to a monotonous pace, and after hours and hours of the same crap—long stretched roads filled with people who look very tired, and various angles of different runners relieving themselves off bridges—there really isn't a reason to watch anymore, until you get close to the end.  Inferno reads much the same way, leaving a middle filled with forgotten facts and lackluster characters. 

With all the art descriptions and the face-melting speed we're being thrown from one place to the next, you never really have the chance to relate to any of the players in the story.  And in the end, Mr. Brown wants you to feel the emotional decision of each character, but I was too busy learning history.  Maybe if one of the works of art that he spent so much time detailing came alive and had a moral decision to make, I would have felt a little more than a rumbling in my tummy.  But it turns out the details and descriptions are the real characters in this novel, leaving Langdon and his sidekick as afterthoughts.

"Oh my God. Do you know what that is?"

"No. What?"

"I don't know, that's why I'm asking..."

Don't get me wrong, Brown does some amazing research, and a few tidbits were enlightening, but more often than not, I found myself skipping large sections to get back to the story and some dialogue.

Dante's Inferno is by far, the most intriguing piece of the novel.  In the beginning of the book there are numerous facts, puzzles, and interesting works of art based on the poem keeping you awake and enthused.  But once the running started, my eyes began to glaze over.  To try and fill this running void, numerous other characters start to pop up, spawning sub-plots, and I could have cared less.  (In fact, the whole sub-plot of the ship and the men working on it could have been dropped completely and the story would have remained intact.)  There's a slight twist toward the end, but it's nothing that'll surprise you if you've been paying attention.  And once you finally do know what's really going on, and the story picks up again…the book happens to end a few pages later.

"What's down there, Robert?"

"More paragraphs filled with long descriptions and staggering details. Anyone else wanna go first?"

CONCLUSION:

Inferno feels like a bloated thriller based on a really beautiful and masterful work of art: Dante's Divine Comedy.  If anything, the novel shows you that Dante's poem is really what you should have been reading in the first place.  If you do enjoy art history and symbols, and you don't mind stopping every page and being taught a lesson, then this might be the thriller (word used loosely) for you.  If you like thrillers that continue to push you forward, without backtracking and without stopping, then you might want to pick this up at your local library and save some money.

2 out of 5 stars (minus 1 star for bloated details & 2 stars for lack of character development)