Dan Brown's "Inferno"--First Thoughts

          Dan Brown is back on his game with his new novel Inferno, which puts the failure of his (nevertheless best-selling) last novel, The Lost Symbol, behind him once and for all.  It's good news for Brown, of course, but it's also good news for the millions of readers who have been hoping to see more of the high octane writing they loved so much in The DaVinci Code.
          Of course, Brown has his critics, readers who object to discursive novels that are part travel books, part art history lessons, part symbol chases, and only part mystery and suspense.  For me, however, and for millions of others if we can trust Brown's sales figures, the balance of these parts is effortless fun, popular fiction with an engaging intellectual twist.
          But the new book will surely drive Brown's critics just a little crazier than the earlier books did because it adds yet another level of talk, this time on the evils of eugenics and overpopulation.  Inferno focuses on the planet's inability to supply the needs of an increasing population that, at its current rate of growth, will one day soon become bigger than the ecosystems that have so far sustained it.  Figuring out the moral rights and wrongs facing the characters (and all the rest of us) is half the fun of the book, and the other half is realizing that easy conclusions are impossible, that the issues are more complicated than they at first appear to be.
          The moral consequences of the story, however, are woven neatly into the narrative, which is typically convoluted in the Brown fashion, full of twists and turns that pivot on symbols and hidden messages in art works and buildings.  Robert Langdon, the art historian professor-hero of four Brown novels now, is so super-humanly tuned into the art and architecture of Inferno that Brown sheepishly defends his hero by explaining that he has an "eidetic" memory, which is one "marked by extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images," according to one online definition.  It's not necessary for us to know this, but it doesn't hurt either.  Langdon is clearly better able to connect the dots of history and art and architecture than anyone who ever lived, but, okay, I can live with that.  It puts the fun in motion.
          The literary and architectural images in Brown's Inferno are from Dante's Inferno as well as Dante's city, Florence, where half the novel takes place before heading up to Venice for another large chunk of narrative.  Langdon must solve more than one mystery at a time in this book, however, which takes him from one museum to another, one religious or public building to another, one painter and painting to another, and finally one country to another, for the last quarter of the book takes place in Istanbul, where East meets West.
          In the end, readers either love the wild ride of Robert Langdon and thrill to the social and moral implications of the story--or like British critic Jake Kerridge in the Daily Telegraph, hate Brown and the new book:  "As a stylist, Brown gets better and better," Kerridge writes:  "where once he was abysmal, he is now just very poor."  Happy phrasing, but too harsh.  Apparently popularity like Dan Brown's needs to be attacked by self-styled arbiters of taste, like Kerridge, who feels personally wounded that Brown has found a voice and a character and a formula that readers in huge numbers like reading.  He probably hates Dickens too.