Inferno

Like all Dan Brown books, the prose was completely dry, boring, and lacking in emotion. I just read a bunch of Dan's books in succession while watching his Masterclass videos. He offers some great story writing advice but I really don't care for the style of his own writing. It's a personal taste thing, so pay little attention to that If you happen to be a big Dan Brown fan.

One thing in Dan's Masterclass, that I now find extra funny after reading his books had to do with focusing on the how and not the what. he uses James Bond movies as an example; every one of them is the same. We all know there's going to be an evil villain that needs to be defeated with a global plot based on some form of greed. We know there will be two beautiful women, one working for the villain and one pure and good. (Bond will bed one of these women or both.) Bond will defeat the villain. He will have gadgets to do so. Etc., etc. when writing such a story, Dan instructs that the author should not worry so much about what happens but how everything happens. And now that I have peeked behind the Dan Brown curtain watching his Masterclass videos, his formula sticks out to me like a sore thumb. They are all the exact same story, just with a different setting (in Europe), a different beautiful woman whose great feminine beauty asexual Langdon appreciates but for whom he has no real sexual desire, a villain whose objective is supposed to leave us feeling ambivalent, his Mickey Mouse watch, lots of religious symbolism and Langdon's agnostic view of those symbols, etc. etc.

I had a lot of fun reading the formulaic Harry Potter books but Dan Brown and HIS formula is just not for me.

Posted Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Actual Rating: 3.85 out of 5 stars

Originally Posted on Reviews of a Self Proclaimed Bibliophile

My first book read in the new year and also my first book reviewed, so many firsts and so much happiness! I also tore through this book, I started reading it on Tuesday and ended up finishing it just before 9PM PST on Thursday. I haven’t read a book that quickly in a very very long time. Clear indication that I was absolutely absorbed in this book! However, regardless of my enjoyment of this plot I still felt as if I could have been reading any of the other Robert Langdon novels. Inferno was filled with much more deception, but then came the expected betrayal by a character which had been built up as an ally. I don’t understand Brown’s obsession with this trope, I felt myself constantly questioning the motives of each and every character that Langdon came across which isn’t something I wanted. I then became complacent, I thought the plot had evolved from that same trope only to find myself blindsided when I came to find out that someone had been playing Langdon the whole time. If I had been reading a physical copy of the book, I imagine that I would have thrown it across the room in anger. Yet, regardless of my anger towards certain aspects of the story I don’t find myself hating the book.

Overall, I really did like Inferno because this novel continues in the form of Brown’s Angels & Demons further questioning the necessity for ethics and moral framework in the scientific world. Science is continuing to advance faster than laws can regulate it, much like the internet, and these advances raise a lot of questions regarding right and wrong, progress, and our future. I wasn't expecting to find myself in the midst of an ethical battle regarding the idea of overpopulation, though it is an issue of growing concern, yet Brown tackled the subject in a manner which kept me interested in the story. A large portion of what kept me so interested in this novel was the use of facts and scientific evidence as justification for action. One of the most important lessons I have been taught is that facts can be manipulated to support many different claims, it is all based upon context and word choice. I was fascinated by Brown’s understanding of this in his creation of the character Zobrist who utilized the startling facts regarding overpopulation as justification for the release of his virus which impacted the future of humanity forever. It is truly scary just how easily he was able to justify his actions, it is scarier to think that all of us are capable of that same crime (though I would hope on much smaller scales).

TL;DR Review: I am torn, I enjoyed a lot of the book and want to rate it higher but as I said…I felt as if I could have been reading any one of the Robert Langdon novels. I can’t get over Brown's continued usage of betrayal in his plots – I just can’t. I don’t understand how Langdon can still be so trusting of other individuals given how many times he has been burned over the course of these four novels! If you are going to read any single Robert Langdon novel, then I would suggest this be the one. Out of all four of the novels in the series, I think that this one and Angels & Demons are tied as my favorite books – I just think that this novel’s grounding on a subject which all of us are so readily concerned for makes it a much more interesting choice in the long run.

My Amazon review:

So mostly this is the usual rather awful Dan Brown novel, with one pleasing twist, and one piece of additional awfulness to make up for it.

It's the usual awful Dan Brown because it is basically an implausible scavenger hunt starring the annoying Robert Langdon, who is even more distracted than usual by historical and architectural trivia while he is supposedly trying to save the world. The female protagonists fall for him because of course they do, and he goes on and on and on and on about things utterly unrelated to the plot (although, to be fair, the travelogue stuff is generally somewhat more interesting than the ostensible plot or the activities of the cardboard characters).

It is awful because (perhaps sensibly) the editors don't seem to have bothered editing the text (why bother when it's going to sell a zillion copies anyway), and while words like "unstraddled", "faceup" and the endlessly-repeated "bloodred" might be amusing if this was an experimental free-verse poem or something, scattered around in the otherwise flat and conventional prose they are just distracting and illiterate (would it have been so hard to type "dismounted", "face up" and "blood-red"?). He uses "enormity" to refer to a statue being large, just like a high school kid, and no one corrects him. The book even has "telegenic effluvium" for "telogen effluvium", which is embarrassing just to read, but I'm willing to assume this one is just someone not bothering to double-check a computer spell-checker.

It is awful because he gets his name-dropping quotes of Oppenheimer and Marx freaking wrong (and the correct versions would have worked so much better), which inevitably makes the reader wonder if there are equally sloppy mistakes in the travelogue and art-history sections, which would be a pity.

It is awful for the usual inexplicable references to specific irrelevant brands and people. "Maurizio reversed the boat's Volvo Penta engine, expertly backing away from the bank." (Targeted at those readers whose first action on getting onto a Venetian gondola is to check out the make of the engine) "... already skimming across the lagoon in a futuristic black tender -- a Dubois SR52 Blackbird..." (because the atmosphere would have been completely different if it were, say, a Windy 8M, a Novurania Launch 600, or heaven forbid some kind of ChrisCraft.) "Monteverdi, Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini composed pieces based on Dante’s work, as had one of Langdon’s favorite living recording artists -- Loreena McKennitt" (Because of course we are endlessly fascinated with Langdon's every music preference and clothing habit; don't get me started on the heavily symbolic-of-nothing Mickey Mouse Watch he wears.)

It is awful for reasons that I could bore you with for quite some time (the ellipses! the completely implausible reactions to things! the dumb things that supposedly hyper-intelligent characters say! the painfully ignorant throwaway statements about what "Darwinists" believe! the more or less unchallenged and far from correct statements about how overpopulation is going to kill us all!).

It is redeemed somewhat by a large twist somewhat more than halfway through, that I admit I didn't see coming at all, and that gave me that few minutes of delight in thinking "wait, but then..." and "oh, so that's..." and paging back through the book to see what it actually said in various passages that now have completely different meanings post-reveal. The twist made a couple of things that had seemed weird and wrong on first reading make perfect sense; also a good and pleasant feeling.

But then, the crowning weirdness, that I can imagine feeling right and somewhat satisfying in a different book, but for me utterly deflates this one, is that (mild spoiler warning) it turns out at the end that everything all of the characters have done since the first page of the book has been for nothing, has made no difference at all. The world would have been just the same if they'd all woken up to the big serious threat by the Bad Guy, and thought "ah, to heck with it" and turned over and gone back to sleep (aside from the more or less indirect and accidental deaths of a couple of minor innocent characters, and some serious traffic problems in Venice). So, I mean, what? It really doesn't matter at all that Mary Sue Langdon figured out the faux-clever clues before the bad guy's deadline? So... why did I read this book, exactly, then?

It's possible that this is Book One of a series, and that in some sequel it will all turn out to have mattered. But if so that sequel will be yet another awful Dan Brown novel, and really, is it worth it?