In fear of fortress whopping

GRIDIRON by Philip Kerr Chatto pounds 14.99

PHILIP KERR has written a book about a silvery tall building with a mind of its own that traps and tortures its occupants. Its reviewer is sitting sealed in cool canned air, behind toughened glass and smart- card doors, halfway up Canary Wharf. Kerr must be thinking: I've hit the bullseye.

His idea, already sold to Hollywood, did not come by chance. Kerr had noticed that towerblocks and computers still make a lot of people nervous; he had watched the claustrophobic indoor bits of Die Hard and Terminator 2; he had read critics of modern corporate fortresses like Deyan Sudjic and Mike Davis. The whole project seems to have been planned, researched and marketed with the intricacy of the fine-framed monolith that provides its setting and plot.

Unfortunately, the opening 50 pages are about as lively as a board meeting. Kerr describes the genesis of the Gridiron in the kind of over-fussy technical detail that Tom Clancy fans read to while away long flights: "As drawings manager Kay's function revolved around the computer and the Inter-graph design system, which made her the guardian of the database..."

The building has been commissioned by a shady Chinese company which wants to use it for industrial espionage, but we learn far more about its design firm's office politics than we do about that. Very obviously, the Gridiron's architect is set up as a megalomaniac, awaiting his nemesis. And his bitter subordinates are introduced in a bewildering cloud of titles - like many thrillers this lacks memorable people - and each of them says things like "memo all this to the client."

Once Kerr has set up his scenario, however, his writing starts to relax and linger. He catches the eerie hums and rattles of an empty office block as the Gridiron awaits its first tenants. He lets flickers of self-awareness - "the bigger the boys the bigger the toys", says one character - lighten the story's heavy progress, as the building's controlling computer slowly starts to think for itself. And he gives the computer its own intriguing voice: partly that of an efficient servant, cleaning the loos and scenting the building's air through its pre-arranged programs, and partly that of a stirring adolescent, learning its power over the "human players" as it watches their every move. Its rebellion starts in small ways, like lying about the weather outside, making the building's security guards reach for their umbrellas while the Los Angeles sun is actually beating down. Then it locks the doors, pinning the architect and his cronies in the basement, to roast in hot air and gag at the smells of excrement it releases into the air supply, while Schoenberg is pounding away deafeningly over the PA system.

Characters are killed off ingeniously - one by a beserk lift - and Kerr cleverly uses the Gridiron's fortress design, like the jagged paving around it designed to keep the homeless away, to override any possibility of rescue. Despite these details, though, a vivid picture of the Gridiron building as a whole never quite emerges. And the trapped protagonists are cowed by disaster-movie convention - and their memories of The Towering Inferno - as much as by the computer. They pick over their relationships and grope for philosophical conclusions about man and technology, then perform not-quite-believable feats of endurance.

The climax is funny, but it is predictable - it even leaves room for a sequel. There's a sense that Kerr could have made more of his material; by giving everyone but the architects and police walk-on parts he sets their struggle in a dramatic and thematic void. And for all his references, the book doesn't do much thinking of its own: it concludes that too much technology can be, well, bad. For a film, this splashing around in the theoretical shallows is probably a good thing: over 370 pages it suggests that Kerr will pick up most of his readers at airport bookshops.