Why You Shouldn't Read "Inferno" by Dan Brown

Dan Brown’s Infernal Fiction . . .

Inferno sets out to decry overpopulation, but instead reveals an ill-cultured, under-educated populace.

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2275/dan_browns_infernal_fiction.aspx#.UZ-BTdhn18E

"What’s this book about? It’s 462 pages of bad prose. Portentous sentence fragments. Italics, for somber emphasis. J-----, there are childish profanities! Even childish punctuation?! Anticlimaxes, a good dollop of Most Favored Bigotry, for sales; one dimensional characters, most of them pallid even in their one dimension, and a message with all the sophistication of Sesame Street.

What’s that message? We’re all going to die, die, die a horrible death! Yes, the world is becoming overpopulated! Actually, the world’s population is leveling off, but the truth here is not convenient. That’s because the threatening message is another needle, for injecting the promising message. What’s that one? It’s simple. We all need to let scientists and readers of the New Yorker and other brainiacs to direct human evolution, so that we can break out into a “transhuman” and “posthuman” age. Who are the enemies? The Catholic Church (naturally), and all of us perfectly normal people who like to marry and have children. Shame, shame. And then, too, we must level some very mild criticism at the Robert Langdons of the world—Brown’s twit of a hero—who don’t like to marry and have children (that’s good), but who might feel just a tiny bit squeamish about mass sterilizations and eugenics (that’s bad). After all, as Brown reminds us several times, didn’t Dante say that “the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality”? Actually, no, Dante never said anything so stupid. John F. Kennedy, that poseur, said that Dante said it. But Dante reserves the worst place in hell for those who return evil for good; and the epitome of them all is Satan, traitor against God, with his wings flapping forever in impotence.

Let me spoil everything in the book. For hundreds of pages you are led to believe that there are bad guys running around trying to kill Langdon and the de rigueur Xena Warrior Princess, the pate-burnt Sienna Brooks. There are no bad guys. For hundreds of pages you are led to believe that a horrible plague, to wipe out a third of mankind, like the Black Death, is about to be unleashed. It isn’t. There is no such plague. It’s a virus that will make a third of mankind infertile. For hundreds of pages you are led to believe that the biohazard is in Florence. It isn’t. Then Venice. It isn’t. It’s in Istanbul."