This is no heavy-weather novel
The Age
Saturday September 26, 2009
A novel about D-Day is a deeply satisfying romance, writes Peter Craven Turbulence By Giles Foden Faber & Faber, $32.99 GILES Foden is best known as the author of The Last King of Scotland. He is one of those contemporary novelists who is interested in exploring the no-man's land between fiction and drama, which is perhaps another way of saying that he is a literary novelist, a writer who aims for a perfect control over the pattern of words he weaves, who is nonetheless intent on telling the kind of story that might grip. Shades of Graham Greene or such contemporaries as James Buchan and Nicholas Shakespeare.He has one hand tied behind his back in Turbulence, which is by way of being a novel about a weather forecaster. The trick is that the pretext for his hero's divinations is the most fraught occasion in modern memory €” D-Day in 1944, the invasion that would seal Hitler's fate but that had a sink-or-swim aspect because if the Allies got the wrong forecast, everything might have been doomed.Turbulence takes the form of a memoir written in the 1980s by a distinguished Cambridge meteorologist off now in the Middle East who played a crucial role in reading the riddle of the winds and rains for that great day. In particular in the light of that strange phenomenon, turbulence, and the intervals of fine and foul weather that can confound the professional and make matters of climate seem symbolic of the inscrutabilities of everyday life.The pastiche (if that's what it is) in Foden's case is very good. Our protagonist goes to icy windswept Scotland in quest of the great eccentric genius who understands (or does he?) the mystery of the number that will unlock this spectral vapoury disturbance of the universe. Along the way he meets some vividly evoked individuals €” young women who are like a musical comedy duo, a craggy bearded scientist and his American Jewish investigative partner who do their experiments with the help of their pet sea lion.There are white-haired knighted toffs who oversee the whole conundrum and worried chaps with moustaches who try to co-ordinate everything. There is also the odd American weather wizard, more loud-voiced than stiff upper-lipped, who bring their own volleying energy and braggadocio to all these sepia-tinted proceedings.At the heart of the mystery there's the great man who knows not only through the brilliance of his mathematics but with the intuitive power of prophecy and poetry how you can simulate the variegated irregularities and get the right answer. Or so we wonder. The prophet also has a young wife much given to miscarriages who also seems attracted to the hero. The great man is also a pacifist, which makes twisting his arm in the direction of the war effort an even more tortuous proposition. Foden is remarkably successful at bringing alive the lost lore of a Britain at war. Turbulence is full of odd, nervous stiffnesses as well as people breaking through barriers that are as liable to be social and human as they are scientific. The sexual entanglement between the young man and the master of what can be known gets so murky (apropos of the wife) that it seems to verge on incest. And then there's the strange act of war our hero sets up which affects the number prophet in the darkest and most ghastly way.Through all this there are sunlit flashes of memory from the main character's African childhood (which he shares with his creator). These come to the surface dramatically when he decides with some foolhardiness to partake in the D-Day invasion himself and is wounded for his pains.This, and every separate part of Turbulence, is done brilliantly with an artful recapitulation of historical detail and atmosphere that is absolutely credible.Foden has, in fact, written a kind of imitation of the background war story, the documentary novel (it's self fictionalised in technique). I suspect a lot of the people who stirred to the glories and the shadowlines of World War II when they were back in short trousers will find this romance deeply satisfying even if they think the real epic is Anthony Beevor's D-Day.Turbulence does seem to be meticulous in its historical reimagining and in the pertinent factual details.It's probably a fair way from being either the most impressive or the most entertaining novel Giles Foden will write but in its ugly duckling way €” with one foot in the history and philosophy of science and the other in the blood and squelch of the Normandy landing €” it does suggest how much he can be both. Someone to consider when you want the ghost of Graham Greene.
© 2009 The Age