Prose vision illustrates never-ending torment The new novel Inferno by author Dan Brown. Photo: Getty A man with a preference for Somerset loafers and Harris Tweed jackets wakes in hospital. He is injured, groggy, beset by gruesome visions of blood-red rivers, of a mysterious woman with silver hair, of glimpses of Sandro Botticelli's painting La Mappa dell'Inferno, a work inspired by Dante Alighieri's famous depiction of the underworld in his epic poem Inferno. The man is Robert Langdon, professor of art history and symbology at Harvard University, who needs only a glimpse, through his hospital window, of an imposing stone fortress with a notched parapet and a 90-metre tower to realise he is in Florence. Trouble is, he has no memory of the past two days, nor of how he came to be in Italy. Inferno is part thriller, part travel brochure, part Wikipedia entry. Meanwhile, the deeply tanned provost of a shadowy organisation called the Consortium stalks the deck of a luxury 237-foot yacht moored off the Italian coast. He waits anxiously for word that the woman he has sent to dispose of Langdon has completed her mission. Successful formula: Dan Brown. Sure enough, within a few minutes Langdon, the rather unprepossessing hero of previous blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol and Angels and Demons, is on the run from various governments and secret organisations. Shots are fired, and exhaustive details of historical monuments are related. Pulling the strings is Bertrand Zobrist, maniacal transhumanist, father of germ-line manipulation and a proponent of the Population Apocalypse Equation. Zobrist is trying to engineer the sterilisation of one-third of the human population in order to avert extinction, and the riddles he sets in place are inspired by Dante's Inferno. Luckily for us, Langdon is "well versed in Dante's work, and his prominence as an art historian who specialised in iconography meant he was occasionally called upon to interpret the vast array of symbols that populated Dante's landscape." The chase to unravel the mystery of Langdon's lost two days - and to decode the eschatological intent of the diabolical Zobrist - gets under way. The only clue is a metal tube bearing a biohazard symbol, found in his jacket lining. He is ably assisted, however, by Dr Sienna Brooks, who has a willowy elegance but eyes of unusual penetration. She also has an IQ of 208 and "telegenic effluviam." The pair set off through Florence, through the Boboli Gardens, through the Vasari Corridor to the Baptistery of San Giovanni ("an eight-sided structure consisting of three distinct tiers that ascended to a shallow white roof") where Dante was baptised. Once the sights of Florence have been exhausted, perhaps around the fourth ring of Brown's Inferno - where popular novelists console themselves for their lack of critical acclaim by counting their money - our heroes zoom off to Venice, where we "experience the city's inimitable atmosphere." By this time, even the most faithful reader might have abandoned all hope of finding a solution to saving the world, but Langdon and Sienna press onwards, their search taking them ultimately to Istanbul, "the timeless city quite literally the bridge from the Old World." On the way they pick up more friends and enemies, notably a mysterious man in Plume Paris eyeglasses with bleeding skin, and Dr Elizabeth Sinskey, head of the World Health Organisation. Taking Brown to task for his dreadful sentence construction and clunky dialogue would be akin to chiding Ronald McDonald for the nutritional deficiencies of a Big Mac, but the most impenetrable mystery of Brown's oeuvre might be that of its author's massive commercial success. Inferno - part thriller, part travel brochure, part Wikipedia entry - doesn't deviate from the formula established in his other novels and, like its hero, has little discernible personality. A lot seems to happen but, really, it is mostly the same few things happening over and over and over again. A chase, an arcane clue, some historical trivia, a personal revelation. And repeat. Stay tuned for the next one. Chris Womersley's novel Cairo will be published by Scribe in September. Dan Brown Bantam Press, 480pp, $39.95 Buy the ebook.