THE
TOWER - RICHARD MARTIN STERN
One hundred dignitaries and VIPs gather on the top floor of New
York's newest, grandest and tallest skyscraper to celebrate its completion and
official opening. As crowds and television cameras gather on the
street outside to watch, unbeknownst to everyone is that a
disgruntled sheet-metal worker is setting a bomb off in the basement.
Unbeknownst to him is that the skyscraper is riddled with cut-price
electrical wiring so when his bomb explodes it causes a power surge,
setting off fires throughout the whole building. The people on the
top floor become trapped and suddenly it's a race against time to
save them as fire roars ever upwards towards them, turning the tower into an unapproachable fiery column of death.
And that's the plot of The Tower by Richard Martin Stern,
basically. It's a relatively simple idea for a story but it just so
happens that Richard Stern thought of it first and subsequently it
was turned into the film The Towering Inferno starring Steve McQueen,
Paul Newman and a cast of Hollywood A-listers.
The year was 1974 and the fashion in Hollywood was for all things
'Disaster', so you had The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, Airport
and so on; films in which truck loads of Hollywood actors were put
into impossible-to-escape-from situations just so audiences could
flock to the cinema to watch them all suffer. And flock they did,
turning The Towering Inferno into the highest grossing film for that
year and earning eight Oscar nominations.
On reading The Tower today, it's impossible to not make comparisons
to 9/11 and indeed the World Trade Center is featured in the book as
playing an important role in the attempt to rescue the trapped
dignitaries.
Through the dialogue of the characters, the author asks all kinds of
questions that would naturally be raised in such a situation although
no answers are even attempted to be given. Instead, what we get is
303 pages of what reads like a script for an American, daytime
television soap series. In hindsight, you can see that it's perfect
material for a Hollywood blockbuster.
Sometimes I read these books so that no-one else has to.
John Serpico
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