Changes

|title=The Tower

|sort=Tower

|buy=No

|borrow=Maybe

|pages=288

|publisher=Macmillan

|date=October 2006

|isbn=1405052015

}}

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.

But it hasn't 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 weren't 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 didn't feel any the wiser by the end of The Tower than I did at the beginning. And I certainly didn't feel as though the characters had got any wiser either.

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