TURBULENCE

Giles Foden

Faber and Faber, hardback, 368 pp, ISBN-10: 0571205224

Price: £16.99

Preti Taneja

Meet Henry Meadows. He’s a sexually naive and frustrated sort of chap, dreaming of greatness while seeking oblivion at the bottom of quite a few whisky glasses and several pints. How should such a young man make his way in the world? When that world is at war and he knows how to predict the weather, he might do pretty well it seems.

War creates upheaval, which might be described as turbulence, catching society in a whirl and churning it up so that the most unlikely people get caught up in the strangest events. Henry is a young academic; a meteorologist uprooted from Cambridge by his sense of moral obligation to contribute to the war effort. His task is to get information from Ryman, a reclusive genius who, problematically for the war effort, is also a pacifist. Henry must apply Ryman’s theory to predict that most unpredictable of forces: the weather.

So is it just a book about someone over-indulging in Britain’s favourite sport? No! Henry’s success will ensure that the D-Day landings will be timed exactly right. Lives, and the outcome of World War Two, depend on him. Whether he succeeds or not forms the basic plot of the book.

It’s a gripping premise, allowing Giles Foden, author of Last King of Scotland (which was made into a highly successful film) to craft what he calls, and indeed is, a ‘Novel of the Atmosphere.’ Foden mines every metaphor that the physics of turbulence can offer, taking on the literary stalwarts of memory and its function, human feelings versus rational behaviour and the buffeting effect of randomness and predictability on individual lives caught up in seismic historical events. The result is a carefully observed, epic story that presents its themes with an earnest freshness, detailing every bit of research its author has done to get the tone of the period exactly right. That includes noting the difference in taste of American cigarettes to British ones, capturing the casual sexism of the time in unselfconscious asides, or talking about turbulence in the language of an academic expert.

The book raises lots of questions even as it seems to present a theory of everything, so The Literateur turns to the book itself for some answers.

TL: Why ‘Turbulence?’ isn’t that a bit of a high concept scientific theme for your average reader?

T: It is really just the study of whirls and eddies, in particular those that make up, on different scales, the atmosphere in which we all live.

TL: Great idea for a novel. And the book has an interesting structure. It starts in the 1980s with its narrator, Meadows, on a ship carrying fresh water to Africa. Then Meadows recalls the war and his youth; he is writing a book based on his diary of the time. Finally, someone else takes up the story, to finish it: one of the people whose life was randomly but directly affected by Meadows’ attempted act of heroism, which goes horrendously wrong. The ramifications of this act change the course of several lives, including Henry’s own. How those lives play out is only sketched in the final chapter, and some might say the lasting impression of the book is of something random, unfinished, unsettled.

T: Incompleteness points to the idea of the whole. It shows the way to whatever is emerging at the limits of any system, from an ant-lions nest in Nysaland, to the ever-expanding edges of the universe.

TL: Africa is an important inspiration in all Foden’s novels. Meadows was a boy there and old Meadows is on his way back there through the course of the novel. He compares the turbulence caused by the Great Rift in East Africa, which felled tribes of all types and precipitated the ends of empires, to the turbulence of war. So is the book a warning?

T: There is cause to believe that there is more extraordinary geological activity to come in the Great Lakes region….there is material that’s longing to rise – and would do so in an instant were it not for side pressing rocks holding it down like a pair of pliers…if there is a shift of plate tectonics, some of that material will come flying up.

TL: Which is portentous on a number of levels, as are many elements of the book. In fact it seems really to be about how everything is connected. As Henry constantly searches for a Theory of Everything that might help him navigate the turbulence of life, he’s actually trying to come to terms with his past; his boyhood, and his acts as a young man. This gives the book an elegiac quality. But what does it all mean?

T: All things are ephemeral, although connected by a web of marvellous affinity…one that stretches from the bounds of the universe to those of individual being.

TL: Sounds very esoteric. But the book is very funny in places, exploring as it does a rather hapless and stiff young Brit, a careful observer obsessed with turbulence in all its forms, even when he goes to the toilet, as he says:

T: The toilet was of the German or Danish type used for stool gazing. I mixed my water with his and flushed the chain, watching the eddies evolve.

TL: Indeed. And what about his success with women? Eventually, despite hints a grand passion, Meadows lasting love affair seems to spring from a shared interest in the Pirates of Penzance. Which seems exactly right. It’s a combination of the poetry, science and pragmatism in his nature that make him an interesting character to spend a few hours with. Like when he tells us, (with more frankness than most modern young men,) about losing his virginity:

T: I’m ashamed to say I lost my virginity while conducting an affair with the landlady of the boarding house I lodged in at Dunstable during my training….Though the landlady shrieked with pleasure…Afterwards she said: ‘There you’ve done it now.’ Or it might have been: ‘There there, you’ve done it now.’

TL: Ha ha. But eventually the humour gives way to offer lessons in many things, not least how to make difficult subjects interesting though absolute control of character and voice, the creation of a believable, if somewhat overly detailed milieu. Foden lectures on the acclaimed University of East Anglia creative writing MA among others, and students could take note of the skills he puts to full use in the novel. He offers a good teacherly piece of advice, for writing and indeed for life, to sum up the heart of the book:

T: It still casts a spell, this turbulence. When we feel ourselves approach the frontier of established knowledge on this topic, we should beware, keeping a firm evidential footing. What we think we see beyond is sometimes just a vision, like a shadow cast on an iceberg.

Trying to see that shadow is the road all writers must travel. As Henry writes his book, it becomes his journey too. Readers who embark on this journey with him will find themselves caught up in a grand scientific, philosophical, but ultimately a very moving, human adventure.