It’s been four long years since readers were enthralled by Harvard professor Robert Langdon’s adventures, so fans will be thrilled he’s back in Dan Brown’s latest novel, Inferno.
This time, Robert wakes up in Florence with no memory of how he got there. He is shocked to find a small projector sewn into his jacket, which projects an image of one of Botticelli’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy, an epic poem by Dante Alighieri which records his fictional descent into hell, purgatory and paradise.
When a blonde woman slips into Robert’s room with a gun, he knows he’s in trouble.
Luckily, the quick-thinking and gorgeous doctor Sienna is there to help – and so begins a story that crosses countries and centuries to defeat Robert’s greatest antagonist yet, the mad scientist Bertrand Zobrist.
We soon find out that the professor must discover The Divine Comedy’s relevance to a world facing its greatest crisis yet: overpopulation. As Inferno starkly points out, it took humans until the early 1800s to reach one billion people – today, the Earth’s population is on track to hit eight billion.
Bertrand believes this will cause the destruction of the planet as people are driven to their basest behaviours – the proliferation of the seven deadly sins as depicted in Botticelli’s illustration.
With this threat breathing down the neck of humanity, the scientist’s solution is to release a new plague in order to thin the population. Robert’s mission? To stop this from happening.
Inferno has all the ingredients to keep Dan Brown fans happy: a fast pace, murder, intrigue, art, architecture, history – and, of course, tweed jackets and a Mickey Mouse watch.
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