This itinerary soon exhausts all the available means of ground transportation, which justifies one of Brown's product placements – a smarmy ad for NetJets, an American company that specialises in "the luxuries of private air travel" and supplies CEOs with flying minicabs. Previous novels sent Langdon on chases through Paris, Rome and Washington now the same itinerary of shoot-outs punctuated by on-the-run iconographic lectures takes him across Florence, up to Venice, then to Istanbul.
Having disposed of God and denounced the rabid religiosity that has overtaken the United States, in Inferno Brown punishes the pullulation of our self-destructive species by threatening to unleash a plague: in his neo-medieval imagination a new strain of the Black Death is a surer way to control our numbers than rubbering up before sex.Īs before, Armageddon is averted by the academic interpreter of symbols Robert Langdon. The Da Vinci Code unveiled a heresy that was intended to capsize Christianity, Angels & Demons aimed a nuke at the Vatican, and The Lost Symbol revealed the government in Washington to be a coven of Freemasons practising sinister rites. The trouble is that he aims to replace both sacred dogma and secular law with his own conspiratorial farrago. Brown reviles religion and treats earthly powers as a pious imposture. "I am your salvation," he adds, although that salvation involves mass extermination. "I am the Shade," the bioterrorist who menaces our species balefully croaks in Inferno.
Like a nutty magus, Brown smirks as his plots fast-forward human history to the last days, when we will all be raptured into annihilation by bombs, vials of antimatter particles or a lethal pandemic. Hogwarts Academy, compared with Brown's brain, is a clean, well-lighted, supremely lucid place.
He views creation as a cryptogram, and babbles about murderous albino priests, self-gelded ogres and a female devil who dresses in black leather and bestraddles a motorbike he is fiendishly elated by the prospect of the world's imminent demise. Inferno begins with the hero suffering from "head trauma", and Brown's head – a boggy hideout for the craziest superstitions of the so-called Dark Ages – seems to be similarly traumatised. Now, after reading the latest version of the apocalyptic thriller he rewrites every few years, I suspect he might be mad as well. I used to think that Dan Brown was merely bad.
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