Set in Rome and Paris, respectively, Brown’s previous novels followed Langdon as he took on detective work out of intellectual curiosity and a sense of moral obligation. Inferno follows the basic patterns Brown established in Angels and Demons (2000) and the celebrated The Da Vinci Code (2003), mixing mystery, art and architectural history, and historical conspiracy theories. Even at this length, however, the book retains the punch of a slimmer whodunit. Like Brown’s previous books, Inferno breathlessly traces the arc of a single day, this time, over the course of a hefty 480 pages. The reader is plunged into the thick of things, sweating and guessing alongside Langdon as the professor wakes up in a Florentine hospital suffering from amnesia, embroiled in a mess that involves hired assassins, the World Health Organization, and a cross-section of the city’s literati. Luckily, Robert Langdon-Harvard’s resident Professor of Symbology -is on hand in Florence, characteristically free from his full plate of academic responsibilities and high-profile appearances.īrown likes to begin his books in media res, and to compelling effect. Zobrist’s penchant for poetry leads him to couch his exploits in a series of aesthetic and lyrical puzzles, all bound up with Dante’s Circles of Hell and their historical representation.

He hatches a plot to “cull” a large swathe of mankind through a planned pandemic: a kind of neo-medieval plague. A kind of mad genetic scientist, Zobrist is hell-bent (quite literally) on curbing the planet’s exponentially growing population.

Brown might just as well have titled his book The Principle of Population, in homage to early-nineteenth-century demographer Thomas Robert Malthus, whose polemical theories on world population spur the machinations of Brown’s bad guy, Bertrand Zobrist. While that epic poem and its author’s native Florence provide the novel with its geographic, aesthetic, and literary backdrop, a less-celebrated work bears equally upon the narrative’s thread. Dan Brown’s new thriller takes its title from the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Inferno dan brown