Inferno – a revisit

For a short while, didn’t had much of book recommendations or shares happening and began to re-read some of the old ones. Dan Brown is one author, I often go back to in case of boredom. I may have strong opinion on his content, especially the way he leads people on wild goose chase, full of thrilling reveals, only to end it as a damp squib, but one thrill of a ride nevertheless. When I first read Inferno, I felt so bored that it didn’t feel like typical Dan Brown book at all. After hop-skip-jumping across pages during the first try, it felt ghost written at best. When you are awake at 3 AM in the morning, with limited choice of reading material, Inferno didn’t feel half as bad. 

As mentioned on the review before, the book definitely competes with Travel advisor – Venice, Florence. It details about galleries and locations across those two cities like never before and in detail that wouldn’t even be found on history books. Brown must have spent quite a lot of time across these two cities and might possibly have got the inspiration for the book looking at the crowds thronging every available spot in those cities. Coupled with Dante’s history and legacy, mix it with a worldwide phenomenon which is a real time doomsday scenario, you got yourselves a thriller. Unlike his usual maniacal villains who are bent on destroying the age old misinformation campaigns by the church, proving to the world the power of science, this time the villain is actually trying to save the future of mankind in his own way – by sterilizing a third of the population and after 80% of the book spent chasing across cities and countries, when it is revealed that the virus to infect the people has already been launched a week before the chase actually began, it is probably the dampest dampener of an ending ever for a thriller novel. Seems like the author is convinced that this is the only way to save the planet from population explosion and has declared the win for the villain, even before the hero starts his quest. When I ready a bit about Dante’s Inferno in my school, I thought it was a religious book describing hell and the sins associated with it. Brown brings out the love story behind that book and gives a nice twist to the otherwise gory content. That apart, this novel is ridiculously self-defeating of a premise all throughout. Right from the quest to stop the villain being defeated outright, even the bullet injury and the usual police chase all turn out to be staged. The main twist of the heroine being villain’s girlfriend gets lost in the multitude of defeats suffered by the hero. This is probably the most Robert Langdon would’ve lost in a single book.  

The book does raises several critical questions around ever increasing population figures and how it is conversely driving us to extinction. In fact, during my school days, population explosion used to be a big topic and we were asked to do school projects and write essays on this topic. Nowadays I hardly find it being mentioned on any space. Pollution seems to have taken the center stage. In the times of pandemic, a virus that is actually launched to save the future of mankind may not be the best of topics to read and might sound ironic. It is almost like putting a positive spin on the tragedy that is unfolding every single day across the globe. Finally, if you are awake at 3 AM with nothing to read, this is definitely not that bad a book.