Let's dispense with the "This is crap literature!" crowd right away: you won't like me or what I write.

Dan Brown did, with "The DaVinci Code", create a mystery based around old symbols and myths, meshed together in what was quite a fun "little" book. There's nothing to be gained what so ever from claiming "It's not true!". No, it isn't. It's fantasy, and it was well done.

"Inferno", on the other hand, is simply one more of the same. Nothing wrong with that, but the mystery isn't mysterious any more, even tho the symbols are as complex and the clues as obscure. It is one, long list of complex and obscure.

The problem - the very REAL problem - for me was the philosophical claptrap. You might want to avoid the next paragraph.


Highly intelligent people. They suffer so much. Schools bore them; society wish to imprison them in politically correct muck. Society even HATE them for being, well, smart, and good with math.

Not really. We don't understand "intelligence", and we don't really hate those who think differently - unless, of course, they are artists. Could someone explain why a darned clever person would let ANYTHING bore her?

Rant over - but "Inferno" contains two supremely intelligent people; so intelligent that they have insights the rest of us cannot fathom, and since we cannot fathom how RIGHT they are, they have to act without asking. Paraphrased: "Would you in cold blood murder an innocent child to save another innocent child?". The big, moral question of the book. Added to a mix of Transhumanism (that's the "movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity" to quote one of them. The rest of us don't have daring, courageous etc aspirations), evolution, politics on the right hand side of things, and some truly FLAT characters .... no. Sorry, Dan. It's soup, and it isn't even very tasty.


But mainly it bother me that the book could have been split in two: one travel handbook for the symbolically inclined; one, thin, very thin, mystery.