More than seven years have passed since Robert Langdon’s last movie adventure. Inferno is the fourth Langdon novel by Dan Brown and sold nearly a quarter of a million copies in the first week of its release in May 2013.
It goes without saying that reading Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon oeuvre is like pillion riding through the narrow busy streets of Varanasi at high speed. Zoom, screech, brake, and you are there at the heart of things. Whether it be The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Lost Symbol or Inferno (possibly, the list will expand), Dan Brown is the kind of writer who trusts his words passionately and creates a map for his readers to follow.
Of course, this is a thriller first and foremost, but underneath that, it is a historical travelogue. It is a world of paintings by the Masters, sculptures, imposing architecture and the ambience of marble-veined, latticed medieval Europe. It is also about secret rituals and rites, the Knights Templar, unrequited love and the rustle of silk.
As Professor Langdon moves from page to page, from novel to novel, with a momentum of his own, he creates a relationship between the writer and the reader, allowing a lot of elbow room. The stories move with high adrenaline stopovers. That is expected. But there is something else — another storyline communicating in silence. No matter what the subject or the locale, this matrix possesses a constant, a unique signature. Renaissance Italy is the nesting ground of the writer. And, from here the road snakes to Istanbul, Paris, London and crosses the oceans to be in a place as far away as the U.S.
His words lay stress on the pictorial. So, when you enter Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, or move around its three-hundred-year-old Spice Bazar amid the smell of Iranian saffron, Turkish delight and bitter roots or gaze at Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper or Mona Lisa at Louvre, what you witness is a live representation.
The words that the writer pens think and speak for themselves and create a landscape where the reader can take part in the first person. With historian Langdon as your guide, you can walk along Paris’ ancient Rose Line or laze around Rosslyn Chapel in Edinburgh, admiring the astonishing array of symbols from Jewish, Christian, Egyptian, Masonic and pagan traditions.
Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon oeuvre twists and turns through glimpsed goals, the destination reached... No matter what, what is important is moving on.
His novels fan out into marked spaces. Spaces of work and leisure; spaces of dream and dark, muddy spaces. All these are internal spaces. But there is this external space that draws us. His novels grow and mature in the superimposition of these two spaces. The apparitions of history and time past take the shape of phosphorescent beings, glowing and dimming, adding hues and dimension to a racy read.
To read him, one must first cast aside his novel and be prepared to hear the hush tones of in-between lines, the whisper of the theme and bask in the fading light of a summer evening.
