And eventually the book involves itself with Transhumanism, genetic manipulation and the potential for pandemics. Dante’s nightmare vision becomes the book’s visual correlative for what its scientific calculations suggest. There’s a lot more in “Inferno” along these lines. While talking about controlling the rapid growth in population with the head of the World Health Organization, Zobrist is told, “We’re at seven billion now, so it’s a little late for that.” His reply, a fine specimen of mustache-twirling villainy: “Is it?” Brown says it is real, but he has given it “the Consortium” as a fake name) and a doomsday plot to implement. One character, Zobrist, is a wealthy Malthusian with a powerful, secretive, high-tech army at his command (Mr. The formula also calls for sinister cultism of some sort, and in this case the dark scheming involves overpopulation. “Now I know the one place on earth that carries that book,” he thinks to himself.īut it takes more than geography to keep a Brown escapade spinning. As for the third, it is in both Europe and Asia, and Langdon finds a copy of his own “Christian Symbols in the Muslim World” in a museum gift shop at one of its most glorious attractions.
While it would be unsporting to say exactly which cities are involved, two are Italian. But “Inferno” picks three of the world’s most strategically significant, antiquity-rich cities as its settings, and Langdon makes a splendid tour guide and art critic throughout. Sure, there’s an awful lot of touristy detail in “Inferno.” And Langdon will always choose a big word over a small one. It’s a tiny projector that offers a scrambled version of a Botticelli image, “La Mappa dell’Inferno.” And that sends Langdon and Sienna off to the races, engaging in one of those book-length scavenger hunts that Mr. So he’s looking very debonair as he dashes through the most famed and historically important sights in Florence, trying to figure out what a cylinder hidden inside a titanium tube with a biometric seal and a biohazard symbol is telling him. of 208 and a neighbor whose locally tailored suit and loafers fit Langdon perfectly. Sienna, the ponytailed doctor, happens to have an I.Q. But instead he is in Florence, Italy, with his beloved Mickey Mouse watch (sigh) gone and his tweed jacket (bearing “Harris Tweed’s iconic orb adorned with 13 buttonlike jewels and topped by a Maltese cross”) in tatters. Langdon thought he was in Cambridge, Mass., teaching at Harvard. “Do you not see the future? Do you not grasp the splendor of my creation?” That said, this guy with a God complex leaps off a building - or, as “Inferno” puts it, takes his “final step, into the abyss.” And then Robert Langdon’s beautiful, ponytailed doctor yanks him out of bed so they can begin racing breathlessly through. “O, willful ignorants!” exclaims some mystery figure. Brown begins with a crazily grandiose prologue, this one a little more unhinged than usual. Then there’s the bit with the symmetrical clockwise Archimedean spiral, which will have people slowly rotating their copies of “Inferno,” trying not to look silly as they scrutinize the rounded calligraphy on. Brown winds up not only laying a breadcrumb trail of clues about Dante (this is “Inferno,” after all) but also playing games with time, gender, identity, famous tourist attractions and futuristic medicine. To the great relief of anyone who enjoys him, Mr. And that shaky opening turns out to be one of them. When Robert Langdon of “The Da Vinci Code” can’t tell what day of the week it is, the whole Dan Brown brainiac franchise appears to be in trouble.īut “Inferno” is jampacked with tricks. Brown seems to have lost his bearings - as has Langdon, who begins the book in a hospital bed with a case of amnesia that dulls his showy wits. The early sections of “Inferno” come so close to self-parody that Mr. She’s scaring Robert Langdon, the tweedy symbologist who stars in Mr. What is the girl with the dragon tattoo doing in Dan Brown’s new book? She looks like trouble in more ways than one. One of the first characters to appear in “Inferno” is a spike-haired, malevolent biker chick dressed in black leather.
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