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Dan Brown's Inferno review: Bilge, but one hell of a page turner

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'Bilge': A. N. Wilson thought Dan Brown's new novel was 'twaddle' but still highly entertaining

The publication of a new thriller by Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, is always bound to attract huge media attention.

In an underground bunker near Milan, 11 translators have been working round the clock so that simultaneous versions of the book in French, Italian and German can appear with the English-language edition today.

To prevent leaks to the outside world, the translators were not allowed access to their families. Even their meals were supervised, in the staff canteen of the publisher, Mondadori — owned by none other than Silvio Berlusconi.

The firm knows it is on to a winner. For Dan Brown has three precious gifts of which most authors can only dream. 

One, he really does have a talent for making you turn the pages of his thrillers. I stayed absolutely glued to a review copy of this latest one, Inferno. Even though I thought it was bilge from beginning to end, I could not stop myself reading it.

Second, he manages to flatter the reader by apparently having done a great deal of highfalutin research into difficult-sounding old secrets. 

The book which made him not merely successful but shot him into the stratosphere of fame and wealth was, of course, The Da Vinci Code.

That story had art historian and Leonardo expert Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University, accompanied by a gorgeous heroine, being pursued by fanatical homicidal monks, trying to prevent the pair from cracking codes hidden in Leonardo’s work.

These codes revealed that Jesus had been married to Mary Magdalen and had a daughter called Sarah, a dark secret supposedly hidden by the Church and guarded through many a long age on its behalf by the Knights Templar.

Huge success: Writer Dan Brown has sold more than 80million copies of his 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code

Hollywood: Dan Brown attends the premiere of The Da Vinci Code with wife Blythe. Two of his novels have been made into blockbuster films

It did not matter that the theory was pure, Chateau-bottled hogwash — or that it was the same as one promulgated previously by a lesser-known book, The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail.

As the art historian and his beautiful assistant were chased in terror through the beauty-spots of Italy, you got the sense that you, too, were undertaking daring research into the by-ways of religious history.

Which brings us to the third great ingredient in Dan Brown’s success story: he manages to offend people. 

The Da Vinci Code offended the Vatican, and was denounced by the Pope. What better publicity could an author hope for?

  More... Florence awaits surge in visitor interest as Dan Brown's Inferno hits the shelves Dan Brown's Inferno: Ten years after The Da Vinci Code, master symbologist Robert Langdon is back in a spine-tingling new adventure That's a novel idea! Dan Brown deals with writer's block by hanging himself UPSIDE DOWN Translators were confined to underground bunker for TWO MONTHS while they worked on Dan Brown's new novel Inferno

With his new book, Inferno, Dan Brown returns to Italy, and to the semi-religious themes he seems to love. This time he has been inspired by the country’s great medieval poet Dante and his vision of Hell.

As someone who has written a book about Dante, I’d hoped that the new novel, Inferno, would muddy the waters of Dantean scholarship in the same way he had put the cat among the pigeons for Bible scholars. 

In an interview recently, he said: ‘I’ve known for some time that I would write a book based on the Inferno (the first section of Dante’s famous long poem known as The Divine Comedy).

‘Having written Da Vinci Code . . . I’ve spent a lot of time on Christian theology and history. 

‘The Bible states there’s an underworld, and it hints that it might not be a very nice place, but it wasn’t until the 1300s and this vision of Inferno that it became terrifying.’

Bestsellers: Fans queued outside shops to get their hands on Brown's 2009 novel The Lost Symbol (left), while The Da Vinci Code (right) has sold over 80million copies worldwide

This remark suggests he has not spent very long studying Christianity and its history. The Apocalypse of John, which ends the Christian Bible, and was probably written between 80 and 100AD, has a burning lake of fire into which Roman Emperors, and most of the pagans are hurled — fairly terrifying, I’d have thought.

And there are many other meditations on Hell in Christian literature before Dante. So it is quite wrong to say that Dante invented Hell as we understand it today. 

It is true that Dante’s was the first great literary treatment of these themes in medieval times, so perhaps that is what Brown meant.

The whole plot of the Da Vinci novel hung on the lost secrets of the Code, but the new book isn’t like that. 

Its villain, who commits suicide on page one, is obsessed with Dante, and that is why the book is called Inferno.

A mad scientist called Zobrist, he thinks that the world has become so overpopulated that it is only a step away from descending into Dante’s vision of Hell.

Popular: Brown's earlier novels have also seen huge success driven by the popularity of The Da Vinci Code

He therefore decides to do something about it, and leaves a series of clues as to what this is, in famous Italian tourist-spots more or less connected with Dante. 

So he leaves a clue written on the back of Dante’s famous death-mask in the Chamber of the 500 in Florence, for example. There are also clues in Florence’s Baptistery, and in the Cathedral of St Mark  in Venice.

You can see that, as he wrote his well-paced tale, Dan Brown was thinking of exotic film locations for the movie that is bound to follow. 

The way the story is told is very similar to The Da Vinci Code: it is basically an extended chase. He brings back the Da Vinci hero, Professor Langdon, who wakes up in a hospital in Florence.

He is being pursued by a sinister-looking woman in black leather who carries a gun. A beautiful blonde doctor appears to rescue him — and the chase is on.

The first clue left by Zobrist is contained in a Botticelli painting of Dante’s Hell. He has slightly altered it, putting Langdon on the alert and leading him to the next clue. 

Langdon slowly comes to realise that Zobrist has the belief that this tormented world will become a safer place only when at least a third of the population is culled.

The Black Death, Zobrist believes, is the best thing that ever happened to Europe because it took away a lot of hungry mouths and made Europe more prosperous.

A-list: The 2006 film of The Da Vinci Code starred Tom Hanks and French actress Audrey Tautou

After the Black Death came the Renaissance, he points out, and its accompanying great flowering of artistic and literary talent.

So Zobrist has put a slowly dissolving plastic bag . . . somewhere!

Does it contain the deadliest virus known to man? Langdon comes to believe so. He and his beautiful companion arrive in a Venice swarming with tourists and believe the bag is hidden in the lagoon.

Then there is another clue, which reveals to them that the bag is not in Venice, but in another lovely location, Istanbul.

By the time Langdon realises where the bag is, and what it contains, he has also found out some startling truths about the other characters around him.

Even as I sat there, glued to the chair and unable to stop myself reading, I asked myself: if I was a maniac bent on destroying the world, why would I do so by laying a childish paper-chase in three beautiful film locations, before leading the hero to the answer in the underground cisterns of Istanbul?

Why not just go to some crowded place — Beijing, for example, or Mumbai — and release the deadly Whatever-It-Is into the atmosphere?

The answer, of course, is because this story will be more exciting on the cinema screen.

Dan Brown claims to have gone into philosophical, theological and literary history in great depth for his books, but if he has done so, he has left no trace of these in-depth researches in Inferno.

It’s all twaddle, but at least it is entertaining twaddle. Let’s just hope the new Pope won’t make the mistake of his predecessors and boost Brown’s sales even further by issuing a denunciation.









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