Inferno is a 2013 mystery thriller novel by
American author Dan Brown and the fourth book
in his Robert Langdon series, following Angels
& Demons, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol.
The book was released on May 14, 2013 by Doubleday.
It was number one on the New York Times Best
Seller list for hardcover fiction and Combined
Print & E-book fiction for the first eleven
weeks of its release, and also remained on
the list of E-book fiction for the first seventeen
weeks of its release.
Plot
Harvard University professor Robert Langdon
wakes up in a hospital with a head wound and
no memory of the last few days.
His last memory is walking on the Harvard
campus, but he quickly realizes that he is
now in Florence.
Sienna Brooks, one of the doctors tending
to him, tells him he suffered a concussion
from being grazed by a bullet and had stumbled
into the emergency ward.
Suddenly, Vayentha, a female assassin who
has been following Robert, breaks into the
hospital, shoots the doctor in charge of Robert's
care, and approaches Robert's room.
Sienna grabs Robert and they flee to her apartment.
After Sienna recounts the details of his admission
to hospital, Robert finds a cylinder with
a biohazard sign in his jacket and decides
to call the U.S. consulate.
He is told that they are searching for him
and want his location.
Per Sienna's guidance, Robert gives them a
location across the street from Sienna's apartment
to avoid getting Sienna more involved in his
mysterious situation than she already is.
Soon, Robert sees an armed Vayentha pull up
to the location Robert gave the consulate.
At this point Sienna and Robert believe the
U.S. government wants to kill him.
Robert decides to open the container and finds
a small medieval bone cylinder fitted with
a hi-tech projector that displays a modified
version of Botticelli's Map of Hell.
At the bottom of the illumination are the
words "The truth can be glimpsed only through
the eyes of death."
Suddenly, soldiers raid Sienna's building;
Sienna and Robert narrowly escape.
Robert and Sienna head toward the Old City,
believing the cylinder must have something
to do with Dante.
However, they find that Florentine police
and Carabinieri officers have sealed the bridges
and are searching for them.
They run into a construction site near the
Boboli Gardens where Robert illuminates the
modified "Map of Hell" again, notices that
individual letters, which collectively spell
"CATROVACER," have been added to each of the
ten layers of the Malebolge, and that the
layers have been rearranged.
Moving them back to the order in the original
Botticelli "Map of Hell" yields the words
"CERCA TROVA".
Robert recognizes these are the same words
on the painting The Battle of Marciano by
Vasari, located in the Palazzo Vecchio.
Robert and Sienna manage to evade the soldiers
and get into the Old City using the Vasari
Corridor.
Robert stands in front of The Battle of Marciano
trying to figure out where to go next by connecting
the "eyes of death" phrase in the modified
"Map of Hell" with his location.
A custodian sees Robert snooping around and
gets the director of the museum in the Palazzo
Vecchio, Marta Alvarez.
Marta recognizes Robert, having met him and
Ignazio Busoni, the director of Il Duomo,
the previous night.
She leads Robert and Sienna up a set of stairs
by The Battle of Marciano, and Robert realizes
the top of the stairs is on the same level
as the words "cerca trova" in the The Battle
of Marciano painting.
Marta tells Robert that she showed them Dante's
death mask the previous night, which sits
in a room down the hall from the Battle of
Marciano painting.
Robert realizes he is retracing his own steps
from the previous night.
Marta takes Robert and Sienna to the mask
who find that it's gone.
They look at security footage and see Robert
himself and Ignazio stealing the mask.
The museum guards turn on Robert and Sienna.
At this moment, Marta calls Ignazio's office
to question him but is greeted by his secretary,
who informs Marta that Ignazio died of a heart
attack the other night but left a message
for Robert moments before he died.
Ignazio's secretary asks to speak with Robert
and plays to him Ignazio's message.
In it Ignazio esoterically tells Robert where
the mask is hidden, referring to "Paradise
25."
Robert and Sienna escape the guards, but the
soldiers arrive.
They cross the attic over the Apotheosis of
Cosimo I, where Sienna pushes Vayentha to
her death.
Robert connects the phrase "Paradise 25" to
the Florence Baptistry, where he and Sienna
find the Dante mask along with a riddle from
its current owner, a billionaire geneticist
named Bertrand Zobrist.
Sienna later explains that Zobrist was a geneticist
who advocated the halting of humanity's growth,
due to its out of control population.
And that he was rumored to be working on a
means to do so using an engineered disease.
A man named Jonathan Ferris, with a large
bruise on his chest which he hides from the
two, and a severe rash on his face, claiming
to be from the World Health Organization,
comes and helps them escape the soldiers.
They follow the riddle to Venice, where Ferris
suddenly falls unconscious, with Sienna claiming
he is suffering from massive internal bleeding,
causing Langdon to suspect Ferris has been
infected with Zobrist's plague.
Robert is captured by a group of black-clad
soldiers while Sienna escapes.
Robert is taken to Elizabeth Sinskey, the
director-general of the WHO, and is given
an explanation of what is going on: Zobrist,
who committed suicide the week before, was
a brilliant geneticist and Dante fanatic who
has supposedly developed a new biological
plague that will kill off a large portion
of the world's population in order to quickly
solve the problem of the world's impending
overpopulation.
Elizabeth raided Zobrist's safe deposit box,
found the cylinder, and flew Robert to Florence
to follow the clues.
However, Robert stopped communicating with
Elizabeth after meeting with Marta and Ignazio,
and the WHO feared he betrayed them and was
working with Zobrist to unleash the plague.
The soldiers were the WHO's emergency response
team and never meant to kill Robert.
Zobrist had paid a shadowy consulting group
called The Consortium to protect the cylinder
until a certain date.
He also left a disturbing video filled with
Dante imagery, which also showed a picture
of the plague itself, kept in a hidden underwater
location, within a slowly dissolving bag.
The video claims that the world will be changed
the following morning.
When Elizabeth took it away, they were obligated
to protect whatever the bone cylinder pointed
to.
They kidnapped Robert after the meeting with
Marta and Ignazio, but Robert hadn't yet solved
the whole riddle.
They gave Robert benzodiazepine drugs to erase
his short-term memory, created a fake head
wound, and staged every event up to this point
so that Robert would be motivated to solve
it.
Sienna, Vayentha, and Ferris are all actors
working for The Consortium; the call to the
U.S. consulate was also staged.
The leader of The Consortium, having become
aware of the bioterrorism plot, has agreed
to cooperate with the WHO.
Ferris's rash was due to an allergic reaction
to the spirit gum he used as part of the disguise
as the doctor Vayentha "murdered".
His bruises were because the squib used to
simulate him being shot in the chest misfired
and broke his ribs.
He collapsed in Venice because he had been
ordered to detain Sienna, as the Provost had
allied with Sinskey, with Sienna realizing
and punching him in his damaged ribs.
Sienna goes rogue, and The Consortium realizes
she was a secret supporter and lover of Zobrist.
She learned where the plague is being kept
after Robert solved the riddle and acquires
a private jet to get to it before everyone
else.
Robert, the WHO, and The Consortium, team
up to stop her.
From watching Zobrist's video they conclude
that the bag containing the plague will be
fully dissolved by the date the video specifies,
and that Zobrist's clues point to its location:
the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, where Enrico
Dandolo is buried.
Robert and the others find the plague is in
the Cistern, but discover that Sienna is already
there.
The bag that held the plague had already been
broken, presumably spreading through the outer
world via visiting tourists.
Sienna runs out of the Cistern yelling something
in Turkish, which causes panic among the tourists
who stampede out into the city, while Langdon
gives chase.
It is discovered Sienna didn't puncture the
bag; it was water soluble and had dissolved
one week previously in the Cistern waters,
meaning that the whole world has already been
infected.
The date specified in Zobrist's video was
the mathematical calculation of when the entire
world would be infected.
It is also discovered that Sienna was trying
to stop the virus herself, but didn't trust
the WHO because samples of the virus would
certainly find their way into the hands of
governments performing weapons research.
The leader of The Consortium tries to escape
WHO custody with help from disguised underlings,
but is caught later by Turkish police.
It is implied that The Consortium will be
investigated and ruined.
Sienna receives amnesty in exchange for working
with the WHO to address the crisis, since
she is a medical doctor and has extensive
knowledge of Zobrist's research and work.
The plague that Zobrist created is revealed
to be a vector virus that randomly activates
to employ DNA modification to cause sterility
in 1/3 of humans.
Even with future genetic engineering technology,
changing the human genome back would be hazardous.
The human race, therefore, has been forced
into a new age.
Characters
Robert Langdon: A professor of symbology at
Harvard University.
Bertrand Zobrist: A Transhumanist genius scientist
and a madman who is obsessed with Dante's
Inferno, he is intent on solving the world's
overpopulation problem by releasing a virus.
(Felicity) Sienna Brooks: A doctor and Zobrist's
former lover.
She also worked for The Consortium.
She helps Langdon find the virus Zobrist created,
but her past relationship with Zobrist makes
her loyalty to Langdon suspicious until the
end of the novel.
She was a loyal disciple of Zobrist until
she reads his last letter and decided to get
his new technology before it can fall into
the wrong hands.
She believes the World Health Organization
will cooperate with other government agencies
to use Zobrist's new virus for weapons.
She uses The Consortium and Robert to follow
the Map of Hell and get to ground zero before
everyone else, but she realizes that Zobrist
had set off a futile search as he released
his virus well beforehand.
Elizabeth Sinskey: The head of the World Health
Organization who hires Langdon to find Zobrist's
virus.
The Provost: The head of The Consortium.
He tries to accomplish Zobrist's wishes by
securing the location of the virus from Langdon
and Sinskey and to divulge a video Zobrist
made before his death to the media.
When he learns that he was helping Zobrist
in a bioterrorist attack, he helps the World
Health Organization to find the weapon.
He is eventually arrested for his hand in
the events.
Vayentha: The Consortium's agent in Florence
who has orders to follow Langdon, she is later
disavowed by The Consortium.
She falls to her death following a confrontation
with Robert and Sienna in the Palazzo Vecchio.
Christoph Brüder: Head of the SRS team who
is ordered by Sinskey to find Langdon after
she lost contact with him.
Marta Alvarez: An employee in Palazzo Vecchio
in Florence who assists Langdon with Dante's
death mask.
She is pregnant with her first child.
Ignazio Busoni/il Duomino: The director of
Il Duomo in Florence who assists Langdon with
Dante's death mask.
He succumbs to a heart attack prior to the
events of the novel.
Jonathan Ferris: An agent of The Consortium
who pretends to be in league with the World
Health Organization.
He used fake eyebrows and a mustache to pretend
to be Dr. Marconi at the beginning of the
novel.
Ettore Vio: The curator of St. Mark's basilica
in Venice.
Mirsat: A guide of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
The Association for Research into Crimes against
Art
A real organization, The Association for Research
into Crimes Against Art, and its blog, is
mentioned in the novel.
In chapter 72, Robert Langdon uses the ARCA
website to check the history of the Four Horses
of the Basilica San Marco, and is startled
by the passage:
"The decorative collars were added to the
horses' necks in 1204 by the Venetians to
conceal where the heads had been severed to
facilitate their transportation by ship from
Constantinople to Venice."
This passage is taken from a series of four
articles discussing the long and tumultuous
history of the Four Horses of the Basilica
San Marco, the art work with the longest history
of crimes against it, written by Judge Arthur
Tompkins.
Judge Tompkins is an ARCA trustee and faculty
member, who teaches a course on Art Crimes
in War as part of ARCA's Postgraduate Certificate
Program, and he includes detailed discussion
of the Four Horses as part of his course.
Marketing
Brown released the book's title on his website
on January 15, 2013, after prompting readers
to help reveal a digital mosaic using social
media posts, and revealed the cover in late
February 2013.
The cover depicts the famous Basilica di Santa
Maria del Fiore located in Florence, Italy.
He also published the first chapter of Inferno
along with a free ebook of The Da Vinci Code
on March 17.
The ebook was distributed for free to readers
worldwide through online e-book stores like
Amazon, Google Play and Barnes & Noble until
March 24, 2013.
Transworld publishers, the official UK publisher
of Dan Brown books, have also released the
official book trailer through YouTube.
Inferno has been translated into French, Russian,
Turkish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan,
Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
and Danish for simultaneous release.
The publishers hired a team of 11 translators
who worked on the project at the headquarters
of Mondadori in Milan between February and
April 2012.
They were reportedly sequestered in a basement,
and worked intensively under strict security
and secrecy.
Inferno has been also translated into Persian
by Afraz Publication, 3 months after first
publishing.
Reception
Inferno received mixed reviews from critics.
The New York Times praised the book as being
"jampacked with tricks" and said that Langdon
is on "one of those book-length scavenger
hunts that Mr. Brown creates so energetically"
The New York Daily News reviewed the book
favorably, calling it a book of "harrowing
fun threaded with coded messages, art history,
science, and imminent doom."
Other reviews were more negative.
James Kidd of The Independent panned Brown's
awkward prose but expressed approval of the
book's plot, writing: "Brown's fusion of gothic
hyperbole with a pedant's tour-guide deliberately
restrains the imagination through its awkward
awfulness."
The Boston Globe's Chuck Leddy compared the
book favorably to Brown's previous works,
and deemed it "the kind of satisfying escapist
read that summers were made for."
Samra Amir of The Express Tribune was critical
of the novel's predictability and malapropism,
but noted that "Brown’s art reigns over
boredom.
He manages to keep the reader glued."
Writing for The Guardian, Peter Conrad dismissed
the book's content as "conspiratorial farrago"
and further elaborated: "Inferno is also dreadful,
abounding in malapropisms and solecisms, leaden
restatements of the obvious and naive disinformation
about the reality outside the bat-thronged
belfry that is Brown's head."
Commercial performance
Inferno initially sold 369,000 copies at outlets
that report to Nielsen BookScan.
It debuted as the #1 bestselling book in the
USA and was also atop the UK's book charts
in its first week in shops, selling 228,961
copies.
The book remained #1 on Nielsen BookScan for
the week ending May 26, selling 211,000 copies
and bringing its two-week total to 580,000.
Despite slipping 42% in its second week, Inferno
far outpaced the #2 book, Khaled Hosseini's
And the Mountains Echoed, which posted a debut
of 91,000 copies.
Film
Sony Pictures has dated a film adaptation
to be released on December 18, 2015 with Ron
Howard as director, David Koepp adapting the
screenplay and Tom Hanks reprising his role
as Robert Langdon.
References
External links
Official website
An Inferno guide with places, artworks, history
and people mentioned in the book
An Illustrated Guide to the Florence and Venice
of Dan Brown's Inferno
Florence Inferno Blog about symbols, mysteries,
places, and personalities mentioned in the
Dan Brown's novel.
Frequently updated.
Inferno at Goodreads
