What Could Be...And What Is

Jon Steele spent a lot of time as a cameraman, in war zones as well as other, less extreme circumstances, and The Watchers benefits from his eye for framing a shot, setting atmosphere and letting characters describe themselves over the course of a story instead of just throwing out a police-ID-styled paragraph or two.

Steele also has great ability to give his novel a sense of place, which is very important, as the Cathedral and town of Lausanne, Switzerland, forms a vital part of this, the first novel in Steele's ongoing "Angelus Trilogy." The Lausanne Cathedral and its great bell tower are the home and place of work for Marc Rochat, a mentally-challenged young man responsible for their cleaning and maintenance. He holds to an ancient tradition of following up the bells' regular soundings with declarations to the town that he is on duty and all is well.

Rochat's simple existence is interrupted by the appearance of Katherine, a very high-end call girl who has found herself on the ugly end of the business she's been using to become very wealthy. It's also interrupted by Jay Harper, who works as a private investigator for the International Olympic Committee but has no memory of how he got that job or even of anything before Lausanne. The three will find themselves enlisted in a struggle with great consequences for the entire world, against enemies who may be a lot more than they seem. Fortunately, Rochat, Katherine and Jay will also turn out to be a little more than they seem to be.

Although The Watchers is quite a long book, Steele wastes very few of his many pages. Little slice-of-life incidents help develop the story while also introducing us to the characters we're watching move through it. He varies his voice in the sections featuring each player; Rochat's are simple and reflect his distinct way of understanding the world, Katherine's are brash, vulgar and shallow at first, moving deeper as she develops through the story, and Harper's start out with a vague air of confusion and unreality that firms up as the investigator begins to understand more and more of what's going on. They also try to follow in the footsteps of one of Steele's favorite influences, Raymond Chandler.

Steele also skillfully weaves his setting and the supernatural backdrop of his story in and out of the narrative. The cathedral tower and its bells dominate the plot as the actual Cathedral dominates Lausanne. The supernatural elements are based on the Book of Enoch, supposed to have been written by Noah's grandfather but not recognized as a part of either Hebrew or Christian scripture except by small groups of Jews and Christians based in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Steele's use of supernatural beings and theology relies heavily on Enoch, mixed with the traditional Catholicism of his youth, but he supposes no great conspiracy to cover them up and relies on no "secret" history needing to be uncovered, even though Enoch's theology is pretty unorthodox.

Freed of a need to lecture us on "what really happened," Steele can just add together excellent writing, well-drawn characters and an intriguing, supernatural-influenced story to make a great suspense novel. This is the book Dan Brown wishes he could write.

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Inferno, on the other hand, is the book Dan Brown did write, and it continues the mystifying trend of an author actually getting worse the more he publishes. Digital Fortress and Deception Point, Brown's first thrillers, are routine enough but keep things humming along pretty well. Even Angels and Demons, his first book featuring Harvard University "symbologist" Robert Langdon, still manages to be worth the effort of turning its pages. Sure, Brown's novel about the election of a pope and research into antimatter gets a lot more wrong about the Vatican and particle physics than it gets right, but he keeps the lecturing to a minimum and does a little less telling than he does showing.

But in The DaVinci Code, Brown apparently became convinced he needed to fix what he saw as wrong with modern Christianity, and do it by appealing to a secret, hidden history of the church and of Jesus' followers. Langdon, his scientist, lectured other characters and through them his readers about how wrong everybody was. He did so enough that many readers sympathized with the assassin who wanted him dead. The Lost Symbol sent Langdon rummaging through Washington, D.C. and its Masonic-influenced symbolism, but now he's back in Europe in Inferno. But he's in an emergency room with no short-term memory, what seems to be a bullet wound in his skull and a puzzle he needs to solve to make sure whoever started working on him doesn't finish.

Brown hangs a little of Langdon's search on The Inferno, the long 14th century allegorical poem from Dante Alighieri about his journey through Hell. He followed it with Purgatory and Paradise, completing his journey through the afterlife in what college students everywhere have cursed as The Divine Comedy.

Langdon, accompanied by the beautiful emergency-room doctor he met when waking up, pursues clues around Florence, using details from Dante's life and from other Renaissance works of literature and art. He learns he's wrapped up in a plot to release a horrifying virus on the world, conceived by billionaire geneticist Bertrand Zobrist. Langdon must decipher the clues, elude the assassins and evade capture to have a chance of helping the World Health Organization and the shadowy group The Consortium thwart Zobrist's mad scheme.

This being a Dan Brown novel, many "facts" are wrong, starting with a front-page epigram attributed to Dante that can't be found in any existing edition of his writings. It serves more as a brief for some dopey, shallow Malthusianist lectures than anything else (The National Review's Stephen A. Smith goes into much more detail about that here).

Inferno is replete with Brown's usual slumping, leaden prose and glaring plot holes and, as mentioned above, seems somehow to be worse than some of his earlier work. At this rate, he is well on the way from producing a novel named "Hell" to offering one that may make readers feel they've been there.