Could not have picked a better time to read this one! What a trip!
Summary:
In the fourth installment, we find the eidetic detective Robert Langdon caught up in a new life-and-death search… and no idea how it happened. Langdon awakes in a hospital with a head wound and no memory of the previous two days. The only clues are an incoherent voice recording of himself and a mysterious biohazard tube containing a projector depicting Dante’s hell. Suddenly, he and the brilliant doctor, Sienna Brooks, are on a hunt for something that could destroy the world as they know it - a suspected pathogen to stop the overpopulation running rampant on earth. And they’re not the only ones looking for the possible disease. With possible enemies around every corner, who knows who can be trusted.
Will they figure out the puzzle in time? Or will the world be exposed to another Black Death to create another Renaissance.
Verdict: 9/10
As per usual with Dan Brown, I thought I knew what to expect, and then he completely threw me for a loop. Several of them.
Not only do I love the setting of Florence (and others… I won’t spoil where) and Dante’s writing (one of the most well-known epics in history which majorly shaped culture, literature, religion, and more), but the thrills and real life tie-ins left me desperately flipping pages to see what happens next.
With reading so many of Brown's books, you start to see a pattern. They start off with confusion, then a chase, a puzzling out, a reveal, an explanation/action, and then finally a conclusion. I tend to find that confusion part somewhat frustrating as you spend the first half of the books often trying to figure out what the main premise is.
You have to sift through a lot of description of architecture and art and literature (still really interesting and thorough), but part of you wants to get back to the action and know the point of all the tangents. That was extremely apparent in Inferno. But again according to pattern, the last half made it completely worth it!
SPOILERS AHEAD: You think you know what this plague is the whole time as they suspect it will kill off a third of the population. You think it’s a race to stop this mass murder. But that’s not it at all! Not only are they too late (MAJOR SHOCKER), but the pathogen itself is an entirely unique and clever way to stop the uncontrollable population growth. While it’s an ethically questionable method, it really stops the reader in their tracks and rethink everything about the plot and the issue at hand.
And what a prevalent issue to be reading this year as we are in the throughs of a pandemic and having to isolate ourselves from the rest of the masses. How the “villain” Zobrist explains overpopulation is disturbing because it’s all fact. And it’s fact that we see coming to life right now. While they come to some sort of solution in the book, it really makes you wonder how we’re going to solve our own inferno.Really hits home.
I will say, this is one of the more confusing plots to follow of his (which is saying a lot as they’re extremely complex). Inferno deals with a lot of not knowing whether to trust Langdon’s memories versus multiple layers of illusions and deceptions from powerful players in the story. It takes some extra mental energy, but it gave the reader a deep appreciation for how many levels go into writing a story like this. Just be prepared to have your head spun quite a bit.
Loved the overall impact and plot. Probably my third favorite of the series though.
Sidenote: Least favorite of the movies! They completely change the ending and virtually reduce all the complexity of the story to the two-dimensional ‘good guy saves the day’. A very disappointing take on such an in-depth story. I expected so much better, Ron Howard! - 5/10
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