It is highly unlikely that the American author Dan Brown will ever repeat the success of The Da Vinci Code and that is bad news for his sixth novel Inferno, because it is similar in design and development and even more exciting than The Da Vinci Code. This has to do with the location, because Paris may well be an interesting metropolis, in terms of heritage it can hardly compete with the Italian art city of Florence, of which the historic center as a whole is World Heritage. The city of the Medici (or Dei Medici) is the scene of yet another adventure by Harvard professor Robert Langdon and this time it's not about his search for the dark practices of some obscure sect, but about the plan of the mysterious biochemist Bertrand Zobrist, the man with green eyes, who believes to have found a solution for overpopulation on Earth and who wants to execute that plan. But at the beginning of the novel, Zobrist has jumped from the Badia Tower in Florence and the WHO (World Health Organization) calls upon Robert Langdon in order to prevent the execution of the plan of the deceased biochemist, because obviously he has taken measures in connection with the thwarting of his plans.
However, in that same first chapter of Inferno, Robert Langdon awakens in a hospital in Florence. One of the doctors informs him about the gunshot wound to his skull, but the professor does not remember anything about his flight to Italy nor what has happened over the past 24 hours. He suffers from retrograde amnesia as a result of the medication. To make matters worse, a black-clad woman appears with the aim to finish her failed action of the previous evening. Sienna Brooks, the female doctor at his bedside, stops her, but her male colleague is shot in the abdomen and dies on the spot. She takes Robert Langdon to her apartment, for there he is safe, she thinks, but the hunters know their business and still that same night the pair must leave the apartment and look for a safe hiding place elsewhere. Why someone wants to kill him, Langdon doesn't know, but he regularly receives visions about a woman with long gray hair, who tells him that time is running out and that he must start an investigation. Who she is and what he is supposed to do, it is a mystery to the professor, but when he finds a cylinder with a biohazard symbol (organic waste) in the collar of his coat, he holds the first piece of the puzzle...
What follows is a long search that leads Robert Langdon and Sienna Brooks in true page turner style to the domo of Florence, along the gardens and the palace of the Medici, via a secret tunnel over the Arno to another luxurious retreat of the noble Italian family, and finally to the impressive Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, where the drama gets its conclusion. What is at stake is unclear to Robert Langdon, but it soon becomes clear that he cannot count on the US Embassy (which even sends an assassin), nor on WHO head Elizabeth Sinskey (she seems to be abducted by the counterparty): he is on his own, with a cylinder which turns out to be a film projector, and the inscription on a plaque in the film, containing a text of the Italian writer and politician Dante Alighieri, who gave the world a masterpiece with his three-part poem about a journey through the Hereafter, Hell (Inferno) and Purgatory to Paradise. But Robert Langdon has faced difficult situations in the past and so he unravels the mystery on the basis of the text of Dante, with the help of Sienna Brooks (who is not completely impartial) and a memory that gradually returns. And guess what? He finds out that he has already walked the long road to the solution of the riddle, because he meets colleagues who look surprised when he wants the same information from them for the second time in 24 hours.
The detective part of Inferno is exciting, and as a reader you do not expect less of Dan Brown, but what makes the book particularly interesting, is the autor’s attention for the cultural heritage of Florence, and moreover, Dan Brown does not hesitate to put political, cultural and other facts about Florence, Renaissance, Dante, the Medici, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and a zillion of other topics in every chapter of his book. He introduces numbers and statistics in his text about the scale and the impact of overpopulation on our planet, because that issue may be the hobbyhorse of his fictional character Bertrand Zobrist, it soon becomes clear that the catastrophe that awaits humanity also engages Dan Brown emotionally.
You may say with ease that Dan Brown is socially committed this time and that is new, because in his previous novels he succeeded in selling his fictional ideas as (almost) real events by hiding them behind a wall of verifiable facts, what in Paris at the time - after the release of The Da Vinci Code - led to the craziest situations. Inferno's story is completely fabricated, but the core of the novel, namely the overpopulation on Earth, is a very real and serious topic and it is probably more acute than global warming and/or pollution (which are the result of overpopulation). It is the biggest taboo in contemporary human history and if we don’t take drastic measures now, the disaster will unfold before the end of this century, or at least begin to unfold. The British economist and demographer Thomas Robert Malthus 1766-1834) argued that overcrowding would be the problem of the following centuries, and studies, conducted in the past 20 years, suggest that the Earth can feed and maintain a global population of 4 billion humans. Above that number the planet will be irreparably damaged with humans as the first victims. Today there are already 7 billion people on earth (a tripling in less than 100 years) and towards the end of the century the world population is expected to grow to 9 or 12 billion individuals.
Maybe you do not care. Maybe you belong to those who believe that science will find a solution (as for global warming and pollution). In any case, it is courageous for a fiction writer to confront us with the controversial topic in this excellently written detective novel.