In the book, the building is called "The World Tower" and it is downtown a block or so from the World Trade Center but towers over them by 40 stories. This is one of those books, not unlike the movie, with almost a dozen significant characters and a few more recurring side characters. On the day of the official ceremonial opening of The Tower, we follow the architect, the secondary architect, his wife, the owner, his daughter and son-in-law, the crazed loner who sneaks into the building with a bomb, the two cops standing guard (explicitly and repeatedly Black and Irish, who constantly mention race but are friends), the governor of the state, the mayor, an old-school senator and a young rabble-rousing senator. Later, we also get two different people from the fire department and the coast guard each as well as a young woman who seems to have no real role in life other than to be invited to the opening ceremony and fall in love with the governor who is twice her age.
The book is a real hodge-podge of 70s themes. Everybody is depressed and cynical, especially about politics. There is a huge gulf between the older politicians who fought in wars and the younger generation who just wants to tear everything down or something. Likewise, anybody who is educated and part of the east coast establishment is suspect while hard-working folk from the Midwest who love the open land and a stream full of trout are the heroes. Of course, the city itself and people jamming themselves together in big, dying cities is portrayed as some terrible aberration.
If you can't already tell, there is a ton of white male moralistic blathering pretending to be deep philosophy. It's too bad there is so much of it. I am always down for a little bit of demonstration of true character and hard, experienced men in books teaching us how to man properly. But here there is just way too much of it. The portrayal of the governor in particular is just ridiculous. He ends up meeting and falling in love with a young woman at the party while trapped on the top floor and they have the most painful conversations, with him dropping all this 60s establishment man-talk and she just oohs and ahhs about what an important and real man he is. It's not quite as weird as John D. MacDonald at his worst, but there is way more of it proportionally and it is very hard to actually parse any meaning out of it beyond strong man with power is sexually attractive and sensible woman should follow.
It's too bad, because interspersed between all this 70s older white male pandering bullshit is actually a really good disaster adventure. The portrayal of the details of the fire is excellent and terrifying. The action scenes are really good. I was genuinely thrilled at the set piece finale. It's just that all this good stuff takes up about maybe 30% of the book at most. I was reading it and at times groaning out loud and really questioning why I was taking up my summer with this book and then at other times quite psyched. It was a real up and down and read.
I think one of the big issues, beyond the author needing to think he was John Updike, is the plot. Ostensibly, the main story is that this big, complex new building catches fire on the day of its opening celebration, trapping a hundred or so dignataries on its top, 150th floor. All of its elaborate safety features fail in a complex combination of bad luck and human error. This is a great premise. Unfortunately, nobody does anything smart until its too late. The emergency exit doors are blocked, the elevators stop working. There is nothing they can do but wait. So we spend the entire book with the people trapped on the top floor who can't do anything but talk. The only adventure we get until the end is the various firemen who try to make the stairs to the top floor.
The real plot for most of the book is a set of change work orders signed by the second-in-command architect (he is the main protagonist, the simple but brilliant midwestern guy who is married to the perfect yet morally empty patrician east coast woman who went to all the right schools, etc.) that cut costs on a bunch of safety features. These show up in the first few pages and we spend the first half of the book following the investigation to find out who was responsible for them (turns out to be the boss's son-in-law who is an Ivy League scumbag) and then the second half chasing him down to prevent him from destroying the evidence. It's actually not bad as we get to see some of the inside operations and meet a range of interesting tri-state area characters. It's just that with the investigation storyline and the repetitive, mid-reactionary philosophizing we barely get any time with the fire and people escaping it. Just feels like a lost opportunity and one in which if I remember correctly, the movie actually uses much more by splitting people up and having them try and escape in various ways (though the movie is fairly low down in my 70s disaster hierarchy as well).
This problem really hits its climax at the final escape section, where people are getting taken over via cable to the World Trade Center one at a time. They have all the women go first and draw lots. As the fire approaches, panic starts to set in among the remaining men (understandable, I guess). What gets really ridiculous is when the I guess left-leaning congressman who has already been portrayed as you and idealistic goes full-on wimpy protestor by whipping up the people trapped in the tower to what just sort of freak out over the situation and blame the governor? They want answers! They want blame! Well damnit, the governor will have to show them how a real man acts. And of course the young congressman who never worked a real day in his life backs down to the aggressive alpha-male who worked his way up by his bootstraps. It's just so badly done on so many levels.
This book could only have been written by an American, but it should have been written by a Brit.
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