Finished reading Dan Brown's Inferno, which Jeffrey gave me a few days ago. I was initially dismayed that it wasn't an illustrated edition (because I have the illustrated editions of Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code) but, now having read all of it, am delighted that this novel doesn't even need an illustrated edition at all. It is, to me, Dan Brown's most mature, most compassionate, and most credible work.

I have always considered Dan Brown's books to be well-written airplane books, i.e., thick tomes to be read on a long flight, except that people prefer to watch movies on planes these days. All of them are Mission Impossible minus Tom Cruise adventures in print, and are the closest competition in print to TV and DVDs.

Here is another Dan Brown book that has all the elements responsible for his previous successes: a clever plot, interesting puzzles, exciting chases, sexual tension a la James Bond, hopelessly Catholic frames of reference, the knowledge that Robert Langdon will always be saved by some twist (no matter what), cut-to-cut pacing, short chapters, guided tours through cities and museums that verge on dwindling into travelogues and tourism brochures--you'll know them when you encounter them because they comprise the longer chapters. The only incredible element, as usual, is an antagonist like a Batman villain who stage-manages a highly unlikely, theatrical, and elaborate situation that everyone else must crack.

There is of course, that four-page episode/flashback set in Manila that raised a furor when the novel was first released, which makes me wonder, really, what that furor was all about. Whatever Dan Brown saw, I often see. (Maybe the episode was too sordid in comparison with the lush descriptions of Florence, Venice, and Turkey.) If you ask me, the only unbelievable thing in that episode was the old, Filipina woman who sticks a knife in the would-be rapist's back to save a foreigner (she might as well be committing suicide). Whoever complained of that episode most certainly had no access to Lino Brocka's movies. At any rate, I certainly had the intelligence to keep in mind that what I was reading was called fiction.

The only criticism I have in this series is that the protagonist has the most undefined character of all--unlike Judge Dee in Robert van Gulik's Chinese detective series, for example, but then again maybe that is the point. Langdon's precursor is Leamas from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a man who could be anybody.

Strangely, the author makes reference to Logan's Run but not to Soylent Green.

And finally, there is one schizoid episode that throws me off--the duplication scene in which a man, and then a woman, follows the genius into a bar and afterwards submits to his sexual domination. It doesn't go with the rest of the novel's texture. Yet, it could be a Freudian slip on the author's part, an indication that he yearns to write something more literary in the future, for a change.