Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Dan Brown’s latest conspiracy theory – and the powerful people who believe it

The novelist is not the first to say that we’re all doomed

You know Inferno, the new Dan Brown novel, the one that’s had such fabulously bad reviews? Well, it’s not really about Dante’s Inferno at all. What it’s really about — spoiler alert — is that old bogey: global population explosion.

For the baddie, a genetic scientist called Bertrand Zobrist, the big threat to humanity is the inexorable increase in the world population to nine billion by 2050. ‘By any biological gauge’, he tells the head of the World Health Organisation, Dr Elizabeth Sinskey, whom he has lured into a darkened lecture room, ‘our species has exceeded our sustainable numbers… Under the stress of overpopulation, those who have never considered stealing will kill to provide for their young. All of Dante’s deadly sins — greed, gluttony, treachery, murder and the rest — will begin percolating… rising up to the surface of humanity… we are facing a battle for the very soul of man’.

Obviously Dr Sinskey, being an expert scientist herself, has an answer for that one. ‘Recently we spent millions of dollars sending doctors into Africa to deliver free condoms and educate people about birth control,’ she seethes. Zobrist is having none of it. ‘And an even bigger army of Catholic missionaries marched in on your heels and told the Africans that if they used the condoms they’d all go to hell. Africa has a new environmental issue now — landfills overflowing with unused condoms.’ Elizabeth falls silent, ‘He was right on this one,’ she reflects, somehow missing out both on Africa’s Muslim population and population increase in India, neither of which can be blamed on the Vatican. There you have it: the real villain of the new Inferno as seen by Dan Brown: the Catholic church. And yes, this is about as close to up-ending Dante as you can get.

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