★★★
Thriller? Yes. Mystery? Yes. Art history guide to various European cities? Definitely yes. But did I like this? Maybe…?
Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital in Florence with no recollection of how he got there. He has a bullet wound in his head, and there’s a mysterious object in his jacket. Promptly after he wakes up, someone storms the hospital attempting to shoot him. From there, he and Sienna (a doctor he escaped the hospital with) piece together the mystery of the distorted painting of Dante’s Inferno, and get caught up in a mad genius’s plot to save the world from ruin.
You do have to give it up for Dan Brown. This probably will never be my favorite book, but his ideas are certainly unique. Combining the elements of mystery and thriller with art history was interesting, and I enjoyed learning more about Inferno and the different spins on the epic poem throughout the centuries. Who would’ve known it would cause so much trouble?
It’s clear that Brown has done a lot of research for the book. Perhaps a bit too much, in fact. I was just inundated with different facts and histories of the epic. You can’t go a page without being lectured on the history of this certain statue, or the hidden doorways and tunnels commissioned by some royal in the past. There was just too much information being bombarded at you, and so in the end I don’t remember any of it. It got old pretty quick, and I found myself skimming those sections.
Langdon is an enjoyable narrator. He is characterized as the stereotypical college professor, very focused on his craft and basically a huge nerd. There were some instances where he and Sienna were running for their lives and all he can think about is some passage from Inferno and I was just like Really? At this time? This is ridiculous. He also has these strange quirks that were supposed to make him more human and stuff, but hearing about his Harris tweed jacket or his Mickey Mouse watch for the umpteenth time was annoying. That was probably Brown putting too much effort in creating a personality for him other than an art history encyclopedia.
Most of this book consists of Langdon and Sienna following clues that leads them to museums, while evading armed forces that are hell-bent on catching them. (Strangely, the armed forces didn’t do a good job). The different organizations out to get them got confusing, from the Consortium to the World Health Organization to the Transhumanists, and half the time I don’t know who was chasing them. It was like the different groups were there to create more action in the story, because without them it’d just be a professor and a women browsing through museums.
The plot twists were infuriating too. I disliked how characters were set up to look like the bad guy, but then Brown pulls the plug on them and actually makes them a good guy. This happens multiple times in the story, and it happens to the organizations as well. In the end, I stopped trusting everyone because I figured they would just switch sides anyways. It was a cheap trick that I didn’t like.
Anyways, this book was okay. Some parts were entertaining enough, but other parts dragged so much. The ending(??!!) fell short of my expectations, but the way there was still exhilarating. Sure, I had a few problems here and there, but this was a decent book.
The Backflap 