05/25/13 - Inferno by Dan Brown

I am not ashamed to admit that I get excited when I hear the phrase "THE NEW ROBERT LANGDON THRILLER BY DAN BROWN". When The Lost Symbol came out four years ago, I was frigging pumped to read it. I loved The Da Vinci Code, I loved Angels and Demons, hell I even enjoyed seeing a be-mullet-ed Tom Hanks running around in the movies.

This, though? Uhhhhhh....I gotta think of where I should begin.

Seriously, I gotta think hard because there are some real problems here.

Okay, here's the first problem: You could literally replace Robert Langdon with James Bond and still get almost the exact same story. Hell, it might actually work better as a Bond film. Brown has taken one of the most interesting intellectual characters and pretty much made him a goddamned action hero. No, no, no, no, NO. We liked him the way he was, Dan. There was no reason to change that! He was fine.

A quick overview of the plot is this: Some prodigy specializing in the genetic engineering of viruses obsessed with 1)Transhumanism, 2)World Population Growth, and 3)Dante-

No, but that would make for a more interesting idea. No, he's obsessed with the author of The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri. Anyway, he decides that at current population growth rates, humanity will be dead within a century, so he hires a mysterious organization called "The Consortium" (which according to a note at the start of the book is based on a real group, your guess is as good as mine as to what group that is) to hide him from the people he views as his enemies: The World Health Organization. Why are they his enemies? Because he basically kidnapped the head of the WHO and pretty much said "Hey, the Black Plague did wonders for population control, didn't it?" before letting her go. In response, deciding that "Hey, a guy who's a genius at genetically engineering viruses pretty much just proposed germ warfare as a solution sounds like a threat!" takes off after him. While in hiding, this guy Bertrand Zobrist (Okay, Dan, you need to stop asking George Lucas for name ideas.) whips up a virus, plants it somewhere, and because he's a massive asshat, decides to lead the WHO head on a wild goose chase to try and find his virus. Again, this guy is pretty much a Bond villain.

But let's be honest, anything would be better than....that. But there's a twist with Mr. Zobrist because he throws himself off a roof during the prologue. All that backstory only comes out over the course of the book. Because when the book starts with our hero, he wakes up in a hospital bed in Florence, is told that he was shot in the head (well, grazed really), and has retrograde amnesia erasing the last 48 hours of his life.

Hm, an amnesiac hero, where have I heard of THAT before....hmm....

*sigh* At any rate, one of his doctors, Sienna Brooks, helps him escape the assassin who's coming after him, and they start piecing together his memories which leads them on the search for Zobrist's virus. Again, it's familiar to anyone who's read the other three Langdon books, but we enjoyed the ride in those books. But then again, in those books, it's a more immediate threat: Vatican City is about to be blown up, Langdon is accused of murder, and some lunatic has kidnapped a friend of Langdon's. Except for the Vatican bit, none of these had world-spanning repercussions. Here, Brown is going all out crazy with the plot, which has so many freaking twists that I had to recheck things over and over again. Now, Brown is known for that, but this book would give M. Night Shyamalan a fricking migraine. That's not to say some of the twists aren't enjoyable, and as always Dan Brown gets the reader engaged in the puzzle (which as usual involves art). But the last act of the book, the conclusion is where the shark is thoroughly jumped.

Okay, brace yourselves.

In a Watchmen-style twist, the virus went airborne a week before.

Not only that, but it's not a virus in the traditional sense. It's a retrovirus, designed to alter human DNA, to...and I swear to Christ I'm not making this up...render one-third of the world's population sterile.

Excuse me, I have to go bang my head against a wall.

That's right, Dan Brown full-on went Science Fiction. It's explained further that Zobrist thought this was the "humane solution"...and I gotta pause for a second on that. All throughout this book, he's shown as pretty much a cackling madman. He sets things up with "The Consortium" to release a 9 minute video after his death, where for most of it he calls himself "The Shade", and wears a goddamned Plague Doctor mask

(For Reference)

But in the end, he decides to take away people's right to choose whether or not they ever want to have kids, all the while considering it the "humane solution". 

Now, I am not saying that population growth is not a problem. Far from it, it's something that we need to deal with as a species, and as long as certain organizations who shall remain nameless allow proper sex education regarding contraception get out there, we may be able to lick the problem. But Dan Brown has created a new world where 1/3 of people can never even make the choice whether or not to have children, and creates a last minute twist where the madman-style villain is more a tragic figure. 

Jesus. Wept.

I have a child, Mr. Brown. I have no idea if you do, your Wikipedia page is not entirely clear on the matter. With any luck, eventually I may have another. If suddenly I or my wife were unable to, and I discovered that some idiot had engineered a virus designed to take away our ability to, and had the absolute balls to even have - and yes, this is also in the book - a commemorative goddamned plaque installed at the ground zero point of the virus, I would travel to that plaque for the sole purpose of taking an enormous shit on it. And I hardly think I'd be alone in that sentiment either. 

Oh, one other thing: this virus is not specified as targeting 1/3 of the men or 1/3 of the women, just 1/3 of the population. Now, I'm no mathematician, but off-hand, I'd say that the math on that would probably still end in mass-extinction.

Overall, this book was very "meh". The puzzles are neat, the chase is there, but that final goddamned twist just sticks in my craw. Will I reread it at some point? Probably, but not for a long while until the bad taste clears out of my mouth.

Overall rating? 5/10.