Dan Brown, Inferno (2013)

:1:

Midway through reading Dan Brown’s latest tome
I found me in a gloomy state of mind:
All Brown roads lead to bestbookselling Rome

(Or Florence, in this case). Being unkind
Is evidently a doomed exercise.
Dan Brown fans know exactly what they’ll find

And good luck to them. So the hardback flies
Off bookshop shelves, a fillip to the trade;
So who cares if one pseudish blogger sighs?

I crack the spine. Down into hell we wade.
Rob Langdon, with amnesia, in the buff.
Facilis descensus Averno said

Some writer guy, and this is facile stuff:
The very opposite of rich or stately
And yet I still press onwards, running rough-

-shod through: till pausing (p.280)
I ask myself: whither this onward slog?
This crumb-trail—what's Dan done for me lately?

And so I skip straight to the epilogue,
And find the answer to the mystery,
And close the book, and open up my blog.


:2:

I read it in a coffee shop, for free.
Two tenners is too costly for what passes
As a novel despite lacking novelty.

The plot is quick, the prose slow as molasses
Mysterious Villain’s called ‘The Shade’ which sounds
Like half a pair of plastic cheap sunglasses.

A chaff of Dante quotes are thrown around
Mixed with two tons of dumped-in explanation
And Hell is somehow Florence, underground.

Seems Dan is scared by overpopulation
But doesn’t think mass-murder is the key.
The answer’s somehow thriller-code notation

With charts and maps and weak-beer 'mystery'
Magic plague-stuff cached inside a vial.
AGES to solve one clue (hint: ‘Vasari’).

The famous poo-on-a-stick Brown prosey style
(I know reviews routinely make this point,
But still: Dan Brown’s prose—really, it is vile).

Dumb clues and QI-factlets pack the joint:
One time the clue-text’s printed spiral-curled
Another ‘clue’ hoofs Reader in the groin: it

is “In this place and on this date, the world
Was changed for ever” —and that date is—what?
TOMORROW! Wow. With this we’re hurled

(By ‘hurled’ I mean ‘sicked-up’) into a fraught
Race-contra-time that time can never win.
I'm glad my copy's borrowed and not bought.

You’ll never get the hours back again
That you spent reading this. Mind you, my job,
Is reading books—I really can’t complain:

It’ll fob off only those who value fob.
Maybe the coming film will cast Will Farrell
Instead of dough-faced Hanks as hero, Rob.

From Langdon’s bloodstained tweed apparel
At the beginning, to p.461,
Reviewing this is shooting fish-in-barrel.