Inferno- A personal take

This is my first ever book review. I started reading novels only during my 10th. And the first ever novel I happened to place my hands on, was Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. I think its only fair, if I start by reviewing one of Brown's books. Not that my reviews matter or that my reviews are good. Just a plain old guy who couldn't keep his opinions to himself.

Dan Brown's a different kind of author. He happens to be the Director Hari of the west. He dishes out a masala package filled with action, humor, romance, morality,sentimentality and penis jokes in a mind boggling pace. Not that the work's bad. But you go through so many things at once, that you're confused at where the plot's heading. At last, you find out where it is heading: nowhere.

Let me start by summarizing all of Brown's novels. He uses this same formula, not just for the Landon series.

A popular person is murdered in the middle of the night and it leads to a chain of events with devastating consequences which can literally "destroy the world as we know it". An intelligent but unsuspecting hero is being called for expertise which seemingly only he/she can provide. The dead person has left a puzzle to solve, just moments before his death. And solving it is essential to stop the nature of the ticking bomb.
As the protagonist solves it, he is interrupted by an assassin who belongs to an organisation that somehow relates with Christianity or the Government. As fate would have it, he/she is accompanied by an attractive sidekick who always plays second fiddle to the protagonist. We get to see some awkward romance here, accompanied by long hours of monotonous lectures.
But, every book comes with a twist. The protagonist had known the villain, all this time, but never second guessed it.
And what's worse, the villain succeeds, every little time, in every big novel he writes.
We are left pondering in the epilogue, of many things. Of whether the villain has actually done the world any good, Of whether our thoughts on religion are true, Of whether the government is spying on us. And in case of Inferno, we ponder, whether someone can write something as bad as this and get away with it.

Inferno, Welcome to the gates of hell.

Inferno is no different from his time tested success formula. But only, this time it is less intriguing.
In every novel, Brown has one 'new' concept: antimatter in Angels and Demons, Magdalene in DaVinci Code, Aliens in Deception Point,  TRANSLTR in Digital Fortress, and now with Inferno, its overpopulation.
And by the way, God only knows why he wrote The Lost Symbol and what it is based on.
Inferno is definitely better than The Lost Symbol, but that doesn't amount to much.

Inferno starts on a different note: a suicide, rather than a murder. It's revealed in the next 15 pages that the dead one is the villain. And Robert Langdon wakes up with a start, not in his American home, but in a Florence hospital. He seems to have retrograde amnesia, the usual Jason Bourne story. He is on the run from the start and needs to crack a puzzle, but we don't know what it is yet, thus making it somewhat a mystery page-turner. An assassin from an institution named "The Consortium" is sent to kill Langdon. He escapes with a female sidekick Sienna Brooks, as always. The US consulate also seems to kill him and he doesn't know why. Thus, the novel has a promising start.

Then the part of code-breaking comes. Langdon finds that he has a tiny pen projector in his Harris Tweed jacket which shows a modified version of Botticelli's Map of  Hell. With that, and using clues from Dante's classic Divine Comedy, Langdon and Sienna move from place to place. Just from Florence to Venice. The plot always needs a red herring for it to have a twist. And right where you will expect the villain to appear in usual Brown's books, this time instead, a red herring appears in the scene. But his characterization is too weak that, you will immediately guess he is not the villain's sidekick.

One thing leads to another, and they meet the head of WHO, Elizabeth Sinskey. She explains everything. How the villain, Bertrand Zobrist is a psycho who has planned to release a virus to kill all humanity, and how Langdon was manipulated into believing that he was being targeted. Zobrist has made a disturbing video wearing a mask underwater, and talks of purifying humanity. A decent twist arises in the plot, as to who is the assistant of Zobrist, but I won't share that spoiler as it is the only good thing from this novel.
Inbetween, we have continuous repetition on how global population is on its brink and how humans are destroying themselves. Brown needs to mock The Vatican as a sentiment. So he goes on Vatican's take against contraception, which is a good thing.

Langdon solves the code and apparently the virus is in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. Because Turkey is where the west meets east, it suits the psycho's theories. But all efforts are in vain because, the virus had already been released and the whole world had been affected. Oh, and you can't help but remember Dasavatharam climax when the SWAT team sees swarming viruses in their binoculars. The virus, it seems, doesn't kill humans. Instead it genetically alters human DNA and causes sterility. The humans should accept what the future has in store for them. And in a crappy epilogue, Langdon thinks if Zobrist has actually done the world a good thing.

The book has its Pros, which are meager when compared to its cons. A moment when Langdon is told to have said "Va. Sorry, Va. Sorry" is interpreted as very sorry, but later Langdon realises he has actually said "Vasari, Vasari" an artist's name is quite a good one. The metaphors for overpopulation is good. The twist is decent. But the thing is, this novel doesn't have a plot. It is just a series of moments stuck together, desperately trying to make sense. But in the end, it doesn't.

Why would a psychotic villain want to leave trails of clue for a symbologist to solve? If he just wants to burn the world, then why leave people chasing him in vain hope?
The clues could have been solved by any decent cryptologist, thus rendering Langdon totally unnecessary.
The characterization is too weak. Consider Sienna Brooks, the female sidekick. She is said to have an offbeat IQ of 208, but there is not a single instance where she proves to be an above average person, at the least.
The prose is filled with uneasy metaphors and unnecessary facts.
Brown does his mistake of pretending to understand eastern philosophies yet again. In Lost Symbol, it was about Vyasa. In Inferno, he quotes Vishnu. "I am become death, the destroyer of the world" ,when in fact it was a rough translation of Krishna in Bhagavad Gita.
Did Brown consider the repercussions of the solution he provided? Wouldn't infertility increase the crime rate? People would have no one to attach themselves to, they won't feel the need to raise a family. The total social system could come crashing down the boils.
The head of WHO is said to be "a highly coveted and prestigious post", but I doubt if the post has such high political influences as portrayed.
Brown has no fears when he claims Jesus had a bloodline or when he says NSA looks into every email and taps every call, but he worries about naming a secret institution and changes it to "The Consortium".
This book lacks what made the Langdon series click: a startling revelation about our religious past. There is no centuries old conspiracy to uncover, just a very modern threat, and that makes it boring. In short, Inferno welcomes its readers into the gates of hell.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Brown. Who couldn't love Tom Hanks as Professor Landon and his mysterious adventures? But, this was definitely a let down. I think we have had enough of religious symbologies and code breaking. I think its time to put Robert Langdon to rest.

Dan Brown once co-authored a book named "187 men to avoid" with his wife.
If he writes another book as Inferno, he would definitely become the 188th.

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A Remembrance Letter

From

Me,
Obviously.

To

You,
Where it Belongs.

Dear,

I hope this letter finds you in eternal bliss and perpetual happiness. Every time you read this, you must know that you have made your choice, and a good one at that. Your choice to leave me.

Do you remember falling in love? I don't. But I can't help but remember us falling out of it. I remember. Every little detail of it, completely. I still remember that moment of pain when our relationship shattered in front of my own eyes and my love being torn apart with you walking away.

So here I am, trying to think of what went wrong; Guessing too hard about your emotions which you never show; Pushing myself to analyse if our times together were real. In this letter I will get happy, maybe angry, sometimes even sad. Beyond the veils of these emotions I portray, look hard to find some true facts. You will have some food for thought.
I'm now going through a burden of my past memories.
Because if we treat our past with nonchalance, it will come back hard to haunt us.
That' why I feel I will have to share it with you.

The first time when I saw you, nothing dramatic happened. The sky did not fall over the roof. The ground was still at my feet. But then, you cast a gaze upon me. A gaze which was cruel enough to strike my heart with fierce pain. Maybe that's why you are such a Heart-Throb.
For an year, I never knew your name. I didn't even bother finding out. Because I felt you were mine. And Because, after looking at your eyes, my brain functionality does stop. No, I'm not going to make metaphors about your eyes. Silly, what's the point in comparing beauties?

We all have friends. Some friends for a reason, some for a season. And some for a lifetime. Both of us had such mutual friends. And so, the circumstantial social pressure was the reason for our friendship.
Before I liked how you were. But then, I started to fancy you. I liked everything about you. The way you talk, the way you walk, the way you smile, the way you show style.
We had meaningful conversations. You once told me "Looks are merely a facade. Its the living room of heart that needs to be beautiful." And you mean what you say. I respected your philosophies of life.
Somehow, you unsophisticated my life. It was all plain, easy.

We didn't talk much, but texted a lot. It's always been like that. We haven't spoken much to each other. But the mutual affection between two people could not be measured by merely the number of words they exchange. Sometimes, what couldn't be said in person without awkwardness, can be texted with ease.
I think somewhere between, "Hi, what doing?" to "I wish you stay like this forever", I fell in love with you.

It was strange. I didn't know what it meant, to me, to us.
I didn't know if I had to be honest and tell you that feeling, or hide the fact to save our friendship.
I didn't know if you loved me.
I formulate the question in my head.
I ask myself whether it is something that I really want to know.
I ask myself whether the answer will probably make me happy or sad.
You could have even refused to answer, and I might think of the worst.
So I did what all the brave boys do: drop it like honey, instead of pouring it like milk.
I was dropping you hints. The clues to find out the path to my heart.
But, you were smart. You knew already. And, you were brave. You gave me a green signal before I even made a move.
On that midnight, something unique happened. Nobody proposed. Nobody accepted.
We said we love each other.

Life after that, was on a whole new plane. It was happiness, served in a silver spoon.
It's not just about the love. It's about the responsibility, the respect, the reality of it which makes it better.
We had our share of fights, but we always got back. We had our whole life planned ahead of us.
We had our moments.
I look back at what you did to me.
You lifted me up as a person. You bared my grief. You shared my pain. You were an integral part of my life. How nice it is, to have someone interested in you, to care about you, always, forever.

It was like magic. But sadly, magic can sometimes be just an illusion.

When you are in love, reality doesn't affect you much. You give importance to trivial things, and forget the most important ones. You think its going to last forever, but forever does come with an expiration date.

I don't know what it was. Maybe it was me, maybe it was you, maybe it was your dad, maybe it was our life. Apart from assigning blames, the hard reality that striked me was, you wanted to breakup.
Break-up. Just like that.
I know once you have made up your mind, there was no convincing otherwise.

I had sleepless nights. I wondered how you had the courage to speak those words to me. I thought how you could be so rude to not even tell me why.
I thought about it. Maybe it was something I did. But then, you said I was fine, it was not me.
I didn't know why. It eluded me. It was an Identity Crisis. I didn't know who I was anymore. I felt lonely without you. I felt angry with you, for putting me in this state. I felt sad that it had come to an end.
I need you to give me a reason why I feel so depressed.
I need a reason why I cannot concentrate on anything but you.
My world is turning upside down. I'm spinning round and round.
I want to know why you gave me hope and then took it all away.

There was a time when I was afraid to lose you. I was afraid you may not need me as much as I need you. When my worst fears came true, I didn't handle it well.

I said myself I won't remember you. But every time I say that, I always end up remembering you. Now when you were gone, I realized how much I loved you. I realized how many petty fights we could have avoided, how many perfect moments we could have had. Thinking about you, I always cry. I used to be a strong person who never cried. But now that you are gone, I realize you were my strength.

You feel bad for me now. You say you still love me, but we can't be together. You say we are like parallel lines with a lot in common, but can never join. You have your reasons and I respect your privacy.
And I love you enough, to let you go!
I just wonder if you spare a moment to think of me. If I still mean the same to you.
But apart from that, I'm learning to move on.

Now, why write a letter about things which both of us already know?
Because in my experience, I have learnt that the most common feature in human nature is to forget.
The rate at which we forget things is astonishing.
So, this is a remembrance letter, to remind you of our past.
To remind you of a fragment in your past which you will try hard to forget.
So cheers, go ahead and make your life.

Yours always,
Me.

P.S.  I love you.


Footnote: Incidents portrayed are fictional constructs. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely      coincidental.

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