480 Pages
$13 Kindle Edition
You know who Dan Brown is. I'm not going to introduce him.
Ok, yes I am. But quickly. He wrote The DaVinci Code, Angles and Demons, The Lost Symbol, and Deception Point. All very good books which you should have read by now.
Inferno is Dan Brown's latest offering, and his fourth book to feature Robert Langdon, the character who made Brown lots of money with DaVinci Code.
All the Langdon books follow the same basic outline: "the professor and expert on symbology and iconography gets a call and finds himself embroiled in the middle of a high-stakes mystery. He then teams up with an attractive, smart and capable foreign woman who helps fill in the gaps and challenges him. The two cement alliances, skirt villains, and undergo a hair raising adventure to save the world, or just stop some crime or something. In the end, pretty much everyone lied about something. "
Inferno follows the same basic outline, but does attempt to mix things up a bit. To start out, Langdon wakes up in the middle of the action, but has amnesia. This seems a bit weird at first because it drops you instantly into the action, and it's very different than other Brown books, but not necessarily bad.
Reading Inferno right after Graveland made me realize that I don't really love Dan Brown's writing style. It's not bad by any means, but anything compared to Glynn's amazing style is going to seem bad to me. It's the same style seen in the other three Langdon books, with lots of background and history sprinkled throughout. It's quite interesting, but gets a bit old after a while, especially since you know you're not going to remember any of it. But if you love history, its a nice touch.
After the whole "omg, amnesia" thing, the book takes up Brown's traditional pattern with lots of running from historic place to historic place, finding clever ways to escape bad guys, usually through the Langdon's knowledge of symbols (I want to see a game show where real professors of symbology try to use their knowledge to escape heavily armed and well trained men. I feel like it wouldn't turn out the same.) and lots of mysteries and puzzles.
Inferno saves most of it's big, surprising twists for the last quarter of the book. And boy are there a lot of them. After reading five Brown books you would expect to no longer be surprised when a major good guy turns out to be a major bad guy, and vice versa. Yet, it still manages to be surprising. It's quite a remarkable feat actually.
The one big new element added to Inferno was the ethical debate surrounding overpopulation. My bio teacher and I had actually discussed this a bit (one of the few interesting things to happen all year in that class), so it was cool to see it played out in Brown's world.
Basically, humans need to stop reproducing pretty soon. The population needs to go way down. The Earth is coming close to its tipping point, soon it won't be able to support more people. We're already seeing some effects with starvation and food shortages and such.
It's all very scary.
The book also briefly touches on the whole transhumanists revolution. While I've never done much reading on the subject, I always supported it in my head. But when put in context along with overpopulation, it really made me reconsider. Plus, fresh off of Orphan Black, I just loved hearing more about transhumanism.
Seeing Brown, who usually focuses on random art and history references, take on a modern, serious issue was really cool. He did a good job at it. Hats off to him.
**SPOILER ZONE, MAXIMUM FINE $1000**
I don't like to talk about spoilers in reviews because spoilers are the devil's worship, but I just have to make several comments about the ending to this book.
I loved the whole infertile virus thing. The second Sienna said that it wasn't a plague I stopped reading and tried to guess what it would be. I had to outsmart the author for once and guess correctly before I read it. I almost gave up when I remembered the maddeningly random detail about whats her face WHO lady (Sinsky, spelling?) being infertile.
So yeah, mainly I just wanted to brag about getting that right before Sienna explained it all. Go me.
But seriously, the idea was very interesting, and it was cool that Brown actually came up with a solution like that. The whole time I expected they would either stop the plague and never really answer the ethical problem, or the plague would be released and a lot of people would die. Sure it would be sad, but it needed to happen, and all that.
This was a very creative way for Brown to wrap up the book and I really liked it. It was unexpected. He didn't shy away from trying to answer the big ethical question, which pretty much every other author would have done. He gave an answer, another option, but still left it open for debate (literally, Sinsky (spelling) and Brooks flew off to a debate in the end.
So that was cool.
**EXIT SPOILER ZONE, RESUME NORMAL SPEED**
While Inferno is annoyingly similar to Brown's other books at parts, there is enough original stuff here to make the book amazing. If you liked his other books, you'll love this one. It's one of his best so far, in my mind. (Deception Point is probably still my favorite, keeping in mind that I haven't read Digital Fortress yet.)
And even if you didn't read his other books, or didn't like them, there is enough different in this book that you might really like it. The ethical debate alone adds a whole new layer to the mix and it really is fascinating and great.
So I suggest you go read the book. Or go listen to it on Audible. Did that make me sound like a sell out? I hope not.
Next up for me is Stephen King's massive Under the Dome. It may seem like I'm not being my typcial "oh, I read it before it was a movie/TV show"-type prick here, but to be fair, I had the book a long time ago and never got around to reading it. Plus it's big. Plus I lost it. But seeing all the news about the CBS version made me repurchase it and now I'm finally diving in.
After only 70 pages I can already tell this would have been much better as an HBO series. The violence and general awesomeness is way toned down for CBS' audience. So sad.
I'm hoping this book will drag a little less than King's 11/22/63, the first massive King book I read. It was a fantastic book, but hearing about the many years of school plays this guy planned got a little boring after 300 pages.
But anyways, I'm loving Under the Dome so far. Stay tuned for more words on it once I'm finished.
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