Review of Dan Brown's "Inferno"

What is it about Dan Brown?

Few authors in this decade are as polarizing. Every time Dan Brown's next book is announced, it piles up pre-orders through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sellers. Bolstered by pre-sales, each book about Brown's tenacious and resourceful symbologist lands atop the best-sellers' charts for weeks or even months.

The criticisms of Brown's writing are legion, and it is not the aim of the reviewer to reflect on the storyteller's shortcomings, but rather to look at the reasons why his books remain the commercial juggernauts they are, by examining his recent bestseller, Inferno.

From the very beginning, Brown grabs the reader, opening in a Florentine hospital, where Robert Langdon awakens from a horrific, surreal dream, only to discover he cannot remember anything, a particularly traumatic injury for a symbologist who has eidetic, or so-called photographic, memory. Before Langdon has a chance to do anything about his physical and mental injuries, he is attacked by a killer. He narrowly escapes through the intervention of a mysterious and beautiful woman.

From that tense start, Brown keeps things moving very quickly, keeping the reader interested with little letdown in the action. This pacing, just a hairsbreadth shy of a pell-mell run, results in the pages flying past in a blur. With little effort, the reader has become invested in 150-200 pages of story before coming up for air. Like the previous novels in the series, it is an almost compulsively page-turning read, ideal for the beach, poolside, or airplane cabin.

One of the author's particular flashes of genius comes from his choice of subjects. From the arcane research at CERN into antimatter and the political maneuverings of the Cardinals of the Catholic Church during deliberations on selecting a new Pope, to the mysteries of the Knights Templar and the Freemasons, to one of the most quoted and influential pieces of poetry in the Western World, Brown chooses subjects to hang his plot on that capture the reader's imagination. Brown builds his suspense tales, using these fascinating and even controversial subjects as tentpoles for his plots.

Brown also chooses locales that fascinate, from Washington D.C. and London to Paris . His especial focus has been on some of the beautiful cities of Italy, like Rome, Venice and Florence. In his quick-moving prose, Brown succeeds in evoking these settings in a way that satisfies both the world traveler who has actually been there, as well as the armchair voyager who has never seen them. Brown succeeds in making the reader feel they are really there, a payoff from the extensive research Brown does on his settings.

Through the adventures of Robert Langdon, Dan Brown has succeeded in capturing the attention of a nation of readers. As long as he continues to evoke setting as effectively as he has thus far, continues to select topics that meld the public's fascination with controversy, and keeps grabbing his readers quickly and then keeping their interest until they are invested in his yarns, Dan Brown will continue his mammoth success, in spite of the shellacking he takes from the critics.