Dan Brown’s Manila

First thing I did upon arriving in Kuala Lumpur to attend the Women Deliver 2013 conference  a couple of weeks ago was rush to a bookstore for a copy of Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster novel Inferno.  I’m an admirer of the American novelist, whose previous book, The  Da Vinci Code, was the first thing I bought during  a lull in the Beijing + 5 conference in New York City.   Brown has written three other international booksellers, The Lost Symbol, Angels & Demons,  and Deception Point.  More  than being a Dan Brown fan, Inferno  was a must-buy for me because I wanted to look at the context in which a major character calls Manila “the gates of hell.”

I  quickly began reading, enrapt by Brown’s theme and style delivered in 461 pages, but got to  the portion that allegedly infuriated Manilans only on  page 351. What brought about the character  Sienna Brooks’ calling the capital hell? Would that not influence readers into not coming to Manila,  depicted  in reverse by It’s More Fun in the Philippines as part of a land of verdant fields and music and smiling people?

Brooks’ harrowing experience  is actually  incidental in a novel that portrays transhumanists and their scientific and philosophical ideas. The book opens with the suicide of famous genetic engineer Bertrand Zobrist from the  Badia tower in Florence, Italy.  His death plunges people into  fear, as his well-guarded secret —  made possible through a grant to an organization specializing in keeping secrets  â€”  spells the annihilation   of the world’s  population by inflicting on it a plague more than devastating than the Black Plague that halved Europe’s population centuries back.

The deadly  weapon is a high-tech biohazard container, inside of which is an optical device that projects the “Map of Hell” (a version of the famous Botticelli’s  Abyss of Hell, inspired by  the famous Dante Alighieri’s   poem Divine Comedy). Before his death, Zobrist stashes the device in a pool, its release timed to occur at a certain date. On the floor underwater is written the words, “ IN THIS PLACE, ON THIS DATE, THE WORLD WAS CHANGED FOREVER.”

The task of locating the device  before it releases its contents  on the date Zobrist assigns it to change the world falls on Harvard symbolist Robert Langdon – the protagonist in Dan Brown’s earlier best-sellers The Da Vince Code and The Lost Symbol. Where to find it? The brilliant academic is perplexed as he searches for the device; his clues are lifted methodically from lines and words in  Dante’s poem.

The search brings the reader  excitedly along with Langdon — to museums and galleries, to mansions and tourist spot in Florence, and Venice. In this Dan Brown shows off his skills as researcher and art connoisseur, his familiarity with the configurations, scandals and magnificence of historical edifices and human figures.  The search ends in a cistern in Istanbul, but too late, the deathly content of the device has already been released.

Langdon’s services have been employed by Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey, director of the World Health Organization (WHO), precisely because of the  proliferation of symbols involved in the search for the device. Joining him in the search is a pretty, medical doctor with superior intellect — with an IQ of 208 .

Dr. Sinskey had actually conversed with Zobrist,  creator  of the plague device.  Zobrist’s  idea of an ideal global population size is diametrically opposed to  Sinskey’s; he is proposing a method of stopping  population explosion by a biological engineering. She sees the correlation between population density  â€and the likelihood of wide-scale epidemics, but we are constantly devising new detection and treatment methods. The WHO remains confident that we can prevent future pandemics.”

Zobrist is a  leader of the  Transhumanist movement, which Sinskey describes as “an  intellectual movement  (with) a philosophy of sorts, and it’s quickly taking root in the scientific community. It essentially states that humans should use technology to transcend the weaknesses inherent in our human bodies. In other words, the next  step in human evolution should be that we begin biologically engineering ourselves.”

Enter Sienna Brooks, a young  intellectual who becomes the lover of her idol Zobrist. She sees Zobrist jump to his death, and she discovers that the genetic engineering genius had, after all, not created a plague, but a viral vector that will not kill people, but render them infertile.

Before Sienna’s absorption with Zobrist and his ideas, she     lived in  Manila for a month to find herself, to shake off her depression from being so intellectually different from her peers. Following a psychiatrist’s suggestion, she worked hard to stop thinking of herself, but of others, to make a difference,   which she did. She then joined a  local humanitarian group on a visit to the Philippines.

Sienna shudders when looking back at  Manila’s “six-hour traffic jams, suffocating pollution, and a horrifying sex trade, whose workers consisted primarily of young children, many of whom had been sold to pimps by  parents who took solace in knowing that at least children would be fed.

“Amid this chaos of child prostitution panhandlers, pickpockets, and worse, Sienna found herself suddenly paralyzed. All around her, she could see humanity overrun by its primal instinct for survival. When they face desperation. . . human beings become animals.”

“Overwhelmed by a rush of frantic mania, Sienna broke into a sprint through the city streets, thrusting her way through the masses of people, knocking them over,  pressing on, searching for open space. . . . she cleared the tears and grime from her eyes and saw that she was standing in a kind of shantytown—a city made of pieces of corrugated metal and cardboard propped up and held together. All around her, the wails of crying babies and the stench of human excrement hung in the air.”

 Sienna muttered, “I’ve run through the gates of hell.”

I will not quarrel with Dan Brown’s description of Manila.

The intelligent reader will say yes, there’s poverty, there’s criminality, there’s human trafficking  in Manila, but these will not dissuade people from appreciating what is good about Manila.

The overly populated, poor districts of Manila do need checking for its being overrun by poor, hungry souls.  But checking under Zobrist’s formula  with the spread of the viral vector  is not the right thing to do. Brooks says, “An airborne viral vector is a quantum leap-years ahead of its time. Bertrand Zobrist has suddenly lifted us out of the dark ages of genetic engineering and launched us headlong into the future. He has unlocked the evolutionary process and given mankind the ability to redefine our species in broad,  sweeping strokes. Pandora is out of the box, and there’s no putting her back in. Bertrand has created the keys to modify the human race.”

The novel ends with Sinskey and Sienna leaving for the WHO headquarters in Geneva  and join leaders from top health agencies around the world to discuss the crisis brought about by Zobrist and prepare an action plan to help manage the new world created by Zobrist.

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