Dan Brown’s Inferno Depicts Manila as ‘Gates of Hell’
By Cris Larano
“It’s more fun in the Philippines,” the Southeast Asian nation’s tourism mantra proclaims.
For Dr. Sienna Brooks, the heroine in bestselling-author Dan Brown’s “Inferno,” the latest book on the adventures of art historian and Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon, the country certainly offered more — but it wasn’t fun.
Spoiler alert.
The 32-year-old, blond-haired English doctor goes to the Philippines to provide humanitarian care to people in the countryside. But her group instead “settled in among the throngs in the city of Manila–the most densely populated city on earth,” where Dr. Brooks could only “gape in horror” as she “has never seen poverty on this scale.”
For every person she fed, Dr. Brooks could see hundreds more gazing at her with desolates eyes. The book goes on to describe city as filled with six-hour long traffic jams, suffocating pollution and horrifying sex trade, where young children are “sold to pimps by parents who took solace in knowing that at least their children would be fed.”
She saw all around her humanity overrun by its instinct for survival. “When they face desperation…human beings become animals,” she thought.
Dr. Brook’s depression quickly turned into frantic mania that sends her running from it all, her feet leading her to a shanty town, where babies are wailing and the air is filled with the stench of human excrement.
“I’ve run through the gates of hell,” says Dr. Brooks, shortly before a group of men assaulted her. She barely escaped rape with the help of an old, deaf Filipina, the city’s redemption.
End of spoiler alert.
This isn’t the first time that Manila has been at disparaged. And it surely won’t be the last.
But for a country seeking to make tourism a strong pillar of its economy, Philippine officials won’t take this sitting down, a work of fiction or not.
Francis Tolentino, chairman of Metro Manila Development Authority, a government official whose job is the take care of the capital, was quick to express his disappointment and displeasure over Mr. Brown’s “inaccurate portrayal of our beloved metropolis.”
In a letter dated May 23 to the bestselling author of “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels & Demons” –both movie blockbusters as well — Mr. Tolentino, a member of President Benigno Aquino III’s Cabinet, wrote:
“More than your portrayal of it, Metro Manila is the central of Filipino spirit, faith and hope. Our faith in God binds us as a nation and we believe that Manila citizens are more than capable of exemplifying good character and compassion towards each other, something that your novel has failed to acknowledge. Truly, our place is an entry to heaven.”
Not everyone is as piqued at how badly Manila was depicted in “Inferno,” Filipino netizen comments on Twitter show. Some even think that the episode in Manila– it’s less than two pages in a 460-page novel–just made them more curious about Mr. Brown’s latest thriller, whose mystery is based on Italian poet Dante’s masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy.”
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/searealtime/2013/05/23/dan-browns-inferno-depicts-manila-as-gates-of-hell/
