Changes

It's a brutal introduction to the story as a man is killed in the way that they did it in those days: two trees were pulled to the ground and the man lashed between them and then the trees were released. But that's only the background to the story which is set in the here and now and most of it is in The Kemble, a rather rundown theatre, which is presenting a revival of Tom Stoppard's ''Arcadia''. On the opening night there's apparently a fire, but whilst most of the hostages are shepherded out of the theatre a group of seven members of the audience, two cast members and the prime minister's son, Nigel Hastings, are taken hostage. The 'terrorists' (for what else can you call people who take others hostage?) represent New METRO, a group of activists who are campaigning for disused underground stations to be converted for use by the homeless.

I'll confess that when I saw the title of this book, my heart sank. It put me in mind of nothing quite so much as ''The da Vinci Code'', which was fine that weekend when I had a dreadful cold but when you reach the fifteenth reworking you begin to tire of the idea. There are superficial similarities - the constant sense of threat and a code which needs to be broken - but that's where it ends. Fulbright is a better writer than [[:Category:Dan Brown|Dan Brown]] and his characters have a lot more depth. There's an excellent example of Stockholm syndrome as the captives begin to empathise with their captors and collude with them over how to utilise the contents of the vault, some to a more charitable purpose than others.