The Tower by Alessandro Gallenzi

The Tower by Alessandro Gallenzi
Buy The Tower by Alessandro Gallenzi at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: A veritable Dan Brown imitation, but without the brisk attack and drama.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 300	Date: September 2014
Publisher: Alma Books
ISBN:
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Amman, Jordan, and even while the world's tallest building is still being constructed, Biblia are hard at work inside. The global Internet conglomerate is undergoing its efforts to digitise the entire world's knowledge, including a priceless archive held by a local dignitary, when one of the workers involved - on behalf of the Vatican - vanishes, along with some unknown quantities of the works. Enter Peter Simms from England, and a classy Italian colleague, to help relocate whatever it was that was missing - in the face of threats from elsewhere in the Muslim kingdom...

It doesn't take much to see the parallels with Dan Brown's work. Peter Simms is so evidently a Robert Langdon equivalent, although throughout the entire book here we never get to learn what his actual job is. Is he a policeman, for all he does is slowly chase the bleeding obvious. Is he a detective of some other sort? All he seems to do is be British (falling for the exotic foreigner, getting heavily drunk too easily) and help us understand the problem involved. The Italian colleague, Giulia, is definitely there with a purpose - exposition regarding her specialist subject of the works of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth century philosopher killed as a heretic, as it's his opus that must have been taken, for reasons unknown. Even she gets let down by the author - one moment she's completely able to think on her feet, the next she doesn't realise she's being given an Islamic headscarf to wear out of respect.

What Dan Brown probably won't do is take the reader so immersively back into time to the root cause of the problem at hand. Every alternative chapter here is historically set, to tell us about Bruno and show the problems he faced getting his philosophies recognised and accepted by the authorities at the time. But these chapters are often far too clunky - the proceedings gone through with little in the way of authorial speeding up, and little drama or emotion, so they come across as far too dry.

Still, they do show the book's ultimate motive. The fact Bruno's ideas were supposed to gear up - through some of those ridiculous memory aids that take just as much brain power to memorise as what one is trying to absorb - to a total summation of the entire knowledge of the universe under God, is in contrast with Biblia bringing the entire world output to the digital age, and this is more than apparent. But the thriller side - the entertainment value - is surely supposed to be better than it is. The author is correct in giving the owner of the texts at hand lines about how a collector feels the pain of something missing, but why on earth doesn't he know what that is then?! When we do find what it is it doesn't mean a hill of beans in connection with the overarching story, or it didn't to my mind, and the story just drips to an end - people forget photocopies have been made, for one.

There is the fact that neither side can be said to be outright victors, I suppose, but I am clutching at straws to both prove this is not an abject Dan Brown replica - it even quotes one of his book titles, which defeats my purpose, and to find real reasons for this book to engage. It was readable, and quickly flowing when not forcing research into the inquisitors' names down our throats, but it didn't have the deftness that its superiors have.

I must still thank the publishers for my review copy.

If you want historical espionage stories with a dash of religion, we recommend you seek The First Horseman by DK Wilson.

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