Inferno
Dan Brown's new novel, Inferno, features renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and is set in the heart of Europe, where Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centred around one of history's most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces. As Dan Brown comments: "Although I studied Dante's Inferno as a student, it wasn't until recently, while researching in Florence, that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante's work on the modern world. With this new novel, I am excited to take readers on a journey deep into this mysterious realm. A landscape of codes, symbols, and more than a few secret passageways."
2.4 out of 5 based on 10 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
480 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
May 2013 |
| ISBN |
978-0593072493 |
| Publisher |
Bantam Press |
| |
Dan Brown's new novel, Inferno, features renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and is set in the heart of Europe, where Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centred around one of history's most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces. As Dan Brown comments: "Although I studied Dante's Inferno as a student, it wasn't until recently, while researching in Florence, that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante's work on the modern world. With this new novel, I am excited to take readers on a journey deep into this mysterious realm. A landscape of codes, symbols, and more than a few secret passageways."
Reviews
The New York Times
Janet Maslin
“Mr. Brown is more serious than usual when he invokes Dante’s dire warning: “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” But the main emphasis here is hardly on gloom. It is on the prodigious research and love of trivia that inform Mr. Brown’s stories, the ease with which he sets them in motion, the nifty tricks and the cliffhangers.”
12/05/2013
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The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
“Crazy or sane, the ideas of the neo-eugenicists take centre-stage in Inferno. Pity the earnest Danteans, with their now-redundant cribs, and the Florentine tour-guides who will have much of their thunder stolen by Istanbul. And brace yourself for a world-wide media outbreak of sizzling punditry about over-population, global resources and the promise or threat of genetic engineering. However barmy his premises, however leaden his prose, Brown retains all the advantages of surprise.”
14/05/2013
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The Times
Marcel Berlins
“Clues and ideas proliferate faster than the reader can keep up with. Brown has clearly done a lot of research and is too anxious to pass it on. At times the academic in him tussles with his role of popular novelist. Trimming would have helped the flow of action and easier understanding of the intricate plot. But then it wouldn’t be a Dan Brown book and it is arguable that he knows rather better than any of his critics what the public wants.”
14/05/2013
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The Washington Post
Monica Hesse
“I’ll confess that I love Robert Langdon. In this, in The Da Vinci Code, in anything. He’s a windbag, he’s pretentious, he talks too much about his tailored British suits, but he maintains respectful, mostly platonic relationships with a series of brilliant, intimidating women. Read Inferno to learn a bunch of “Divine Comedy” trivia, sure, or to watch a smart man make wild deductions based on Renaissance symbology. But also notice that when it comes time to flee for his life, the smart man lets the lady drive.”
13/05/2013
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
“Ever since Angels and Demons, with its grand guignol verve, Brown’s potboilers have been losing steam. Partly thisis because they are so predictably formulaic, as Inferno extensively exhibits. Proceeding like its predecessors by rapid cross-cutting between scenesso short they wouldn’t straina gnat’s attention span, its plot, like theirs, largely consists of simultaneously beingon the run andracing against time … What, despite this, sabotages any narrative momentum is Brown’s propensity for clogging his story line with clumps of Wikipedia-like data ...”
19/05/2013
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The Financial Times
AN Wilson
“There is a great deal of scientific gobbledegook about “germ-line manipulation”; and there is also some tourist-level art history. Sometimes you wonder where the author got it from, and sometimes he is laidback enough to admit it: “According to the Web site, the Horses of St Mark’s were so beautiful they had become ‘history’s most frequently stolen works of art’”. To help unsophisticated readers, Brown writes like a tour guide, ever anxious to stress the fame of the places and art treasures we glimpse along the way.”
14/05/2013
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The Daily Telegraph
Jake Kerridge
“What’s interesting about Inferno is that Brown introduces a new and welcome moral ambiguity to his work. Although Zobrist, as portrayed in flashback, talks and acts like a standard Bond villain, Brown repeatedly implies that there is something to be said for a comparably drastic approach to solving the global population crisis … As a stylist Brown gets better and better: where once he was abysmal he is now just very poor … But in the end this is his worst book, and for a sad, even noble, reason – his ambition here wildly exceeds his ability. ”
14/05/2013
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
“If you liked his previous books, you won’t be disappointed by this one, because it is more of the same. Once again, it’s a chase sequence across different countries, in a tight time frame, as Langdon progressively unravels improbable puzzles and ciphers, leading to the revelation of a world-shattering conspiracy ... It is just as full of ineptitudes, stumbling blocks and outright howlers as it always was ... The language is repetitious and full of clichés, so that all smiles are wry, looks incredulous and chuckles grim. ”
14/05/2013
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The Spectator
Ian Thompson
“Before Dan Brown, Matthew Pearl wrote a much better Inferno-inspired whodunit, The Dante Club, set in 19th-century Boston. If Dante speaks to our present condition, it is not because we fear damnation (as Pearl was quick to point out) but because Dante wrote the epic of Everyman who sets out in search of salvation. Reading Brown is a hellpit torment all right.”
25/05/2013
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The Guardian
Peter Conrad
“The man who hallucinated this nonsense would be a harmless crank if he didn't have such a loyal, lucrative following. Like a demagogue, Brown panders to the mass mind with its craving for myths and monsters, and he preys on its credulity by claiming that the pseudo-science and muddled art history in his novels are "real" … the mixture is not fiction but an intellectual fraud. Art at its best is a lie that tells the truth. At its worst, as in Brown's infernal Inferno, it's a lie that expunges the truth and replaces reality with its own demented murk and noxious malarkey.”
19/05/2013
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