Good use of the text of Dante’s
Inferno: I had not read it and there will be many other readers of
Dan Brown’s Inferno who are yet to read or have no plans to read Dante’s
seminal Inferno (of The Divine Comedy). It was not on my reading list in
the foreseeable future. And though it didn’t push creating an urge, the
detailed mention of the work did push me to take Google’s help. After reading
the novel, I have done my share of research and intend to read more of The
Divine Comedy.
It is still a good read:
Reading a book is not just a time-pass. If seen logically and on a mature note,
it is one of those better investments of your time that enriches your
experience, a time given that widens your span of thinking. (Okay, I am not
talking here of the cheap literature.)
On this scale, Dan Brown’s Inferno is a good read. Though you
don’t jump over the prospects of the page-turners as you turn-over the pages, still,
you can maintain a consistent pace of reading.
It is about a good beginning:
The gentleman with a knack for getting into troubling environs of mystery and
mysterious intellect gets hospitalized with serious head-injury and an assassin
in pursuit and to compound the misery, the gentleman suffers amnesia that
leaves him without any memory of his current situation – an apt beginning of a
thriller pushing the reader to think of something complex and disturbing coming
ahead and so pushing him to know more - that is a good enough beginning to
sustain for the whole reading length in spite of the book not being an edgy
thrilling saga.
It is not dogmatic/describing
about religion: Though weaved around the Symbology of a heavily religious
work, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Dan Brown smoothly manages to keep away
the religious underpinnings in his Inferno much in the same way he has
done in his earlier works. His use of the religious or cultural or historical
Symbology remains like an objective reading of an existing text.
Some good character
development: Though Robert Langdon is not as sharp as he was in ‘Angels &
Demons’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’, the characters of Sienna Brooks and
Bertrand Zobrist stand out and carry the plot on their shoulders smoothly. The predicament
and emotional quotient of Sienna Brooks touches the heart while Bertrand
Zobrist’s character background and his radical views on an issue (overpopulation)
so regularly discussed pushes one to think. The reader wants to know what
happens to them. The reader thinks on what happened to them.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
