I interrupt this beauty blog to talk about... Dan Brown's Inferno. No spoilers, I promise
I pulled an all-nighter and finished reading Dan Brown's latest, Inferno. I'm half-dead even as I type this, but it has been worth it. I assure you that I will not give away any spoilers.
I speak for most fans of the thriller fiction genre when I say we loved Dan Brown for creeping us out with the now-real-now-fake Illuminati and the mad Camerlengo. We were convinced by Brown to go to the Louvre and search for Mary Magdalene's remains, swearing that the Knights Templar and the Priory were protecting the descendants of Christ. We loved the search for the fake-but-real-but-fake meteorite with alien life. We wanted the uncrackable code to remain undecodable forever.
But The Lost Symbol faltered. The symbol was finally... just that? And some nutter wanted to become God and died in a helicopter explosion? No, clearly, Robert Langdon had passed his expiry date. No hero should hang around beyond a trilogy. I was prepared to hate Inferno for persisting with the good but distinctly ageing symbologist.
But Robert Langdon is back, thankfully in the country where he had his first hair-raising adventures. He's down right at the start this time, so he can only get up and running as the book progresses. And, he stays within the plot, not becoming larger than life and overshadowing the plot, as he did the last time we saw him. One even wants him to get his Mickey Mouse watch back.
I didn't like the prologue. Of course, the event that occurs in the prologue was necessary, but until you understand it - by page 175 or so - the prologue is just twaddle. The verses and the didactic-ism could have been avoided. In fact, I hummed and hawed my way through till chapter three, when things sloooowly began moving. But it all begins to boil nicely by chapter nine. Even so, Langdon's hallucinations were annoying, until I found out why they were occurring.
