The Tower

First Person

Fiction

115

2018-06-26 18:37:09

Valerio Massimo Manfredi is very popular in Hollywood at the moment. His fall of the Roman Empire epic, The Last Legion, has been filmed by Baz Luhrman and is out next year. We can expect to see big screen adaptations of Empire of the Dragons and probably the Alexander trilogy too. I rather enjoyed the Alexander books. They are large but light, busy but clear, and make for some great escapist fiction with no strings attached. My son absolutely loved them. We were looking forward to reading The Tower.

An American scholar and archaeologist, Desmond Garrett, disappeared in the Sahara desert some ten years before the start of the book, which is set in the 1930s. Garretts disappearance was the most recent in a series of mysterious incidents in the area over the preceding two thousand years. Entire units of soldiers have disappeared, murdered, it is said, by the Blemmyae, a mythological race of headless men.

Garrett was searching for the Tower of Solitude, the final mystery of a past civilisation. Garretts son, Philip, is searching for his father, armed only with abstruse clues left by the scholar as scribbled notes in a book. Also searching for Garrett is his arch enemy, the evil Selznick. In Vatican City, concerned priests are monitoring a signal coming from space and must find its receiver at all costs. It seems that the receiver and the Tower of Solitude are one and the same.

So, we have a mixture of Indiana Jones and the Da Vinci Code. You couldnt get more populist than that. Man searches for long lost father through inhospitable terrain and must reach him before the big baddie does. Catholic priests keep secrets from their congregations lest their faith be challenged. Everyone has an agenda. If only it had been kept that simple. Its quite clear that Manfredi is a better writer than Dan Brown, even in translation - and this translation is pretty good.

But it hasnt been kept that simple. Add into the mix the French Foreign Legion, an accident of birth, a spy network, a past love triangle, a present love triangle, a lost people, a desert princess (who, of course, has magnificent breasts), love at first sight, hopeless love, kidnap, a mad queen, lots of improbable fighting, some horrendously cringe-making sex... and oh, the list goes on and on and on. Manfredi, it seems, has flung at his story every single idea he, or any other author of populist fiction, has ever had. And if that werent enough, he seems to lose interest in the final stages of the book and it all ends with a big ol fight and conflagration, but very little denouement. I really didnt feel any the wiser by the end of The Tower than I did at the beginning. And I certainly didnt feel as though the characters had got any wiser either.

Its better than the Da Vinci Code. Thats the best I can say for The Tower, Im afraid. If you like action-based historical fiction, if you are fan of Bernard Cornwell and his ilk, you will like Manfredis books. Look them out. Just not this one.

1

2018-06-26 18:37:09