Book Review: Inferno

Dan Brown's "Inferno" took me a lot longer to read then I expected, considering how excited I was to get through it. It's been a while since I've read a Dan Brown book, so I forgot how much interesting information he manages to pack in amidst all the action and twists and turns. Being a huge art history buff, I have thoroughly enjoyed all of Robert Langdon's crazy adventures throughout Europe, and "Inferno" was no different. 'Inferno' shares many stylistic similarities with both 'Angels and Demons' and 'The Da Vinci Code' including ancient symbology, European art, secret and powerful societies, conspiracies, and futuristic technology. The novel is enticing and exciting, changing pace with every turn of the page, and will keep you thoroughly entertained throughout the duration.

"The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death."

The novel starts out with our favorite symbologist lying unconscious on a hospital bed in Florence, Italy with a gunshot wound to the head. When he awakens, Robert Langdon has no recollection of how he ended up in Italy or what happened the last two days and the two doctors treating him can offer very little information about his whereabouts before he came to the hospital besides the phrase he kept uttering as they brought him in and the small cylindrical package he was carrying in his coat. Within minutes of his regaining consciousness, Langdon is attacked again, and only manages to escape with the help of Doctor Sienna Brooks. They barely manage to escape and upon attempting to make contact with the U.S. Consulate, they are attacked again, leading them to conclude that they can trust no one. Robert and Sienna quickly figure out what the small package contains, and it leads them on a treasure hunt revolving around Dante and his infamous Inferno, throughout Florence and Venice, with the various authorities constantly on their tail. In typical Dan Brown fashion, there are many twists and turns to the tale, and you never know who you can trust and who you can't. Characters switch sides, trusts are broken, and clues misinterpreted, all while the future well-being of the world is at stake.

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis"

In "Inferno", Dan Brown's main overlying theme is the overpopulation epidemic our world is set to face in the very near future. The realism of what he talks about is what makes this novel so interesting: the rapid growth of our population is indeed a major concern today and clearly our current attempts at trying to control it are not working. I was absolutely fascinated by the factual and mathematical foundation for the argument's basis, and the many theoretical solutions that were presented throughout the novel for this problem. Obviously many of the solutions are completely hypothetical and not at all possible in the real world, but the moral dilemmas that revolve around them is what makes the reader really think: what would you do if you were facing this problem and had to make a decision. Dan Brown really makes you completely re-evaluate your moral compass in this novel by presenting a very real problem and a variety of bitter solutions to it, all of which will put you between a rock and a hard place.

I would highly recommend Dan Brown's "Inferno" to anyone looking for a thought-provoking novel full of interesting information about ancient art, Dante, modern medicine, and the problem of human overpopulation. Brown has once again proved to be a skilled story-teller, completely transporting us to a different world and regaling us with another exciting, adrenaline-pumping Robert Langdon adventure.