review; inferno

Inferno
by Dan Brown

In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces – Dante’s Inferno.

Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust… before the world is irrevocably altered.

Review:
Many people have already written very in-depth reviews of Dan Brown’s newest novel. I am no professional critic, but after finally finishing Inferno, I had to put down some of my own views.

Brown has a formulaic approach to his story – I suppose he believes heavily in “why fix something that isn’t broken?”. His successes show that people enjoy the unravelling of mysteries in his systematic approach. Inferno brings Robert Langdon back into the middle of a global crisis, but where the earlier novels had Langdon unravelling history to solve the problem, this novel delves more into unravelling the clues of literature – this had the literature geek in my squealing, even if I cannot claim to have read Dante’s The Divine Comedy myself.

The twists and turns of the novel certainly had me hooked, and the global scale of the crisis had me thinking. The setting felt more real and palpable as compared to the earlier novels – however, the book can be quite dry at times. Brown goes in-depth on descriptions which can take anywhere from half a page to almost two pages, and can be tedious to get through.

All in all though, Inferno is a gripping read.