Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s latest thriller hits stores today, featuring another star turn from the fictional Harvard Professor and crime-solving symbologist Robert Langdon.
Here’s what the Washington Post has to say about the new book:
Tuesday marks the release of “Inferno,” Brown’s newest Langdon installment. One is still excited — one must be; Doubleday is printing a whopping 4 million copies — but the anticipation feels different. At this point, it’s already clear what Brown can do with the genre. He has perfected the breathless art of the cliffhanger chapter, the ooky villain, the historish backdrop. His novels are like high-stakes, 500-page Mad Libs; a reader doesn’t have to worry that it will be a fun ride, just that the adverbs and proper nouns will line up in a way that honors the art form.
Which brings me to the surest way readers can tell whether they have landed in a Dan Brown novel: A character is dying — a wizened character who is the sole possessor of a crucial piece of knowledge. Rather than using the last minutes of his life to scrawl, “The [IMPORTANT OBJECT] is in the [SPECIFIC LOCATION]” on a crumpled napkin, he uses them to concoct an artsy, esoteric scavenger hunt through a foreign city.
The city in “Inferno” is Florence, where a hospitalized Langdon has awoken with a head wound that leaves him unable to recall how or why he arrived in Italy. Fortunately, his fetching doctor, Sienna — a former child prodigy with an absurd IQ — is willing to sling him on the back of her moped and help him figure it out: retracing his pre-amnesia steps and learning how Dante’s “Divine Comedy” can aid them in foiling the posthumous plot of an evil genius. Discovered in Langdon’s rumpled clothes, see, is a small projector that displays a pictorial rendition of Dante’s vision of Hell…
We’ve noticed that, for a Harvard professor, Robert Langdon seems to spend relatively little time at Harvard. But who could blame him? Florence sounds like much more fun.
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