I used to think that Dan Brown was merely bad. Now, after reading the latest version of the apocalyptic thriller he rewrites every few years, I suspect he might be mad as well. Inferno begins with the hero suffering from "head trauma", and Brown's head a boggy hideout for the craziest superstitions of the so-called Dark Ages seems to be similarly traumatised. He views creation as a cryptogram, and babbles about murderous albino priests, self-gelded ogres and a female devil who dresses in black leather and bestraddles a motorbike; he is fiendishly elated by the prospect of the world's imminent demise. Hogwarts Academy, compared with Brown's brain, is a clean, well-lighted, supremely lucid place.
Like a nutty magus, Brown smirks as his plots fast-forward human history to the last days, when we will all be raptured into annihilation by bombs, vials of antimatter particles or a lethal pandemic. "I am the Shade," the bioterrorist who menaces our species balefully croaks in Inferno. "I am your salvation," he adds, although that salvation involves mass extermination. Brown reviles religion and treats earthly powers as a pious imposture. The trouble is that he aims to replace both sacred dogma and secular law with his own conspiratorial farrago.
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