Turbulence?

The roman de nos jours is, most definitely, Giles Foden's Turbulence.

There were extended reviews last weekend in the Saturday Times (by Paul Watkins), the Sunday Times (by Phil Baker), the Telegraph (by Toby Clements), the Sunday Telegraph (by David Robson, and the nearest to Malcolm's taste -- so see also below) and, doubtless, elsewhere. This weekend, Mark Lawson piles in for the Guardian, following Foden's own piece last week on Anthony Beevor's D-Day (which was done over for last Sunday's Observer by Dominic Sandbrook).

All the usual suspects, one might feel.

In all of that, Malcolm was pleased to see Simon Long, a vox pop reviewer for Amazon, making this link:

I had hoped that Giles Foden's Turbulence would be a novel in the vein of Robert Harris' Enigma, describing a scientist's contribution to the Allied victory in World War II - the blurb suggested that it might be. Yes, this is a book about a scientist and the contribution he makes to the war effort, but I'm afraid that is where the similarities end.

Fundamentally, nothing very much happens in this book at all. There are hints at stilted relationships, none of which go anywhere; there is a large sprinkling of technical jargon which I struggled to understand (in spite of having a degree in engineering) and there are a couple of action sequences that don't really fit with the general inertia of the rest of the book. The characters are all largely uninteresting - I certainly felt no burning desire to find out what happened to any of them. The story, such as it is, is basically tedium interrupted by a couple of rather far-fetched incidents. The author's writing style is best described as cold and formal - he completely fails to produce much of a degree of interest in either the events or the characters of the novel.

The differences are that Harris is patently (and successfully) writing a thriller, in the all-knowing third-person; while Foden is aiming for something deeper, first-person revelatory, and more arty. Even when Harris goes deeper and psychological (as with Ghost), he seems more adept. Of course, the truly-sympathetic could suggest that such criticisms of Foden's book are merely reflections of the damaged personality that is the central character.

Robson's review addresses the same issue, from another, wider, perspective:

The facts about D-Day have been well documented, as have the contributions made by the meteorologists involved, including James Stagg of the RAF, who persuaded Eisenhower to change his plans, and the Norwegian Sverre Petterssen. So what is the point of inventing a fictional meteorologist called Henry Meadows, who works with Stagg and Petterssen, then becomes the star of the show, with a brilliant weather-forecasting coup? Foden is not enriching history, but impoverishing it. There is no real sense of the excitement of the build-up to D-Day because the novelist is too busy with his own jeu d’esprit.

That, in essence, is the crux: Foden has trapped himself in the device, somewhere between a metaphor, a motif and an allegory that provides the title for the novel. The "turbulence" has to be read as meteorological, military, internal and psychological, sexual and inter-personal, and -- gulp! -- haematological. Even the dust-cover, showing a weather map of what Malcolm believes is an "occluded front", seems suggestive of the line of a female breast, an implied fetish of the central character.

To pursue Robson a bit further, Malcolm would append two further considerations.

There is, indeed, "a brilliant weather-forecasting coup" in the story of D-Day. The hero of the moment should be Ted Sweeney, the Assistant Keeper of the Blacksod Lighthouse. He made the observations of bad weather which led to the decision to defer the Normandy landings by a day. He, too, passed on the reading of a rising barometer and improving conditions that allowed the landings to go ahead.

Ted Sweeney, though, is only part of the story. Weather reporting only became possible with the arrival of the telegraph. It was 1860 that the Valencia station, that last outpost of the County Kerry, began reporting. Soon, a network of stations was established around the Irish coast. After 1921, the network was still reporting to London. With the arrival of the Boeing Clippers at Foynes, on the Shannon Estuary, and air travel to and from Ireland, something more local was needed. In 1936 Austin Nagle was appointed the first Director of the Irish Meteorological Service. The service, necessarily, continued to rely on the expertise of British scientists on secondment. And therein lies one of the breaches in Irish neutrality, about which neither side wished to speak too loudly.

Perhaps Foden had considered just that story: one of the details given about Meadows, that central character, is that he is displaced by the Irish "Troubles":

After some political difficulties at home -- his family were merchants in Tralee in Co. Kerry -- my father had emigrated to South Africa ... he eventually became manager of a tobacco farm in Nyasaland. My mother was the daughter of a British copper miner from Northern Rhodesia ... It was she that was the Catholic, not him, despite his being Irish. The Meadowses were Protestants. So right from the start I came out of a mixed marriage.

This detail seems to exist for little more than to enrich the "turbulence" theme.

The other complaint, the punchline, in Robson's review is more barbed, and addresses Foden essential technique of blending fiction with fact:

... it is time he stopped seeing fact and fiction as natural bedfellows and recognised that they are ingredients that need to be blended with the utmost care.

The critics concur in applauding Foden's research, though that reviewer for Amazon, Simon Long with his engineering degree, is less convinced. Perhaps with good reason. Foden kills off Meadows' parents in a mud-slide in Nyasaland in 1931. What irritates the pedant in Malcolm is that they travel around colonial Nyasaland in a Land Rover, a marque that didn't exist until 1948. Sphere: Related Content

A popular view (part two)

The second piece with which Malcolm found himself in enthusiastic agreement was Giles Foden in the Review section of Saturday's Guardian (on manly page three, no less). His argument hung on the peg of renewed interest in Rider Haggard:

King Solomon's Mines is currently being edited for Penguin Classics by Robert Hampson in its first full scholarly edition, and She is one of six "boy's own books" being reissued by the same publisher.

Foden continues by asking:

what is Penguin doing, bringing it out now along with five other "epic tales of adventure and bravery", namely Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, John Buchan's The 39 Steps and GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday? And why is Headline Review bringing out its own set of boy's tales next month, including The Lost World and The Man Who Was Thursday.

He suggests:

The simple answer is that they hope to capitalise on the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys, Conn and Hal Iggulden's guide to scrapes and derring-do. This is obvious from the deep-dyed, embossed covers of the Penguin books, whose livery imitates the Igguldens', which itself owes much to the way boy's own titles by the master of the game, GA Henty, were marketed in the late 1880s and after.

He adds, quite properly:

the imperialist ethos is certainly there, more or less explicitly, in the books Penguin has chosen to remarket in this way. But their continuing appeal cannot simply be explained away as retro-imperialism

His critique then trails off into observations on Henty, Conrad and Madame Bovary. En passant, what is it about the Guardian and Bovary? A google of the two terms shows over 54,000 hits. And then there's the delicious Gemma Bovary over and above! Foden's conclusion was what particularly linked to Malcolm's own thoughts:

It must be better that boys take a risk with literary adventure than numb their minds with screens and headphones. The mind-befogging potentiality of electronic media is the real doom now. That's what must be escaped from, not into.

Malcolm would demur from that only in so far as "screens and headphones" do not always, necessarily get in the way of involvement in literature, as Sony, Microsoft and Palm seem to agree. What odds that an electronic hand-held toy would do more to up the reading quotient of school-boys than any class library? It's the "golf-bag" effect: the steeper the entry fee, the more desirable, the glitzier the activity. Essentially, though, the conclusion holds.

Once upon a time, when the world and Malcolm were younger, there was a definable reading route for boys of his generation. It went from

• the Hotspur and the Wizard, and (for the upwardly-mobile) the unbeatable Eagle
  
• through the collected words of Captain W.E. Johns, then a shufti into
• Paul Brickhill particularly Reach for the Sky (which would, today be sold as a "film tie-in"), Pierre Closterman's The Big Show, and the like; which in turn could lead to
• Nevil Shute and the early Ian Flemings.
• And from there, as they say, the world was your lobster.

Moreover, all of this had some kind of street cred. Alongside this, it was still "normal" to read the popular classics which were handed out as school prizes and granny's occasional gifts, and which had a counter to themselves in Woolworths. As a result, and which we can now recognise as an obvious way to discriminate "class", the 11-plus (at least in Norfolk) had an "English Literature", which amounted to knowing the names of these authors.

This brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to ... Rider Haggard, himself a good Norfolk boy.

Malcolm looks with some interest to see if modern editors feel it necessary to bowdlerise Haggard's anti-semitism and racism (both, admittedly, more a social disease of his period than active malevolence). And whether the "deep-dyed embossed covers" will override the heaviness of some of the prose. As for the plotting, Malcolm will quite happily go along with that.

After all, what's wrong with encouraging covetousness for jewels "the size of pigeon's eggs" in Little Englanders, if they discover a love of reading in the process? At least in Haggard the sex-and-violence comes closer to the surface than with that Indiana Jones bloke. Sphere: Related Content