FICTION:Turbulence, By Giles Foden, Faber reviewed by DERMOT BOLGER
AT 13, I ONCE spent 20p on a book that contained an improbable claim that the tiny window of favourable weather, so crucial in the success of the D-Day landings on June 6th, 1944, only occurred because a coven of white witches danced naked on the previous night to beseech the forces of nature for a lull in the storms that occurred on June 5th – the original invasion date.
It was a ludicrous claim, yet occasionally during the fraught days leading up to D-Day, Gen Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, might have decided that he had as much chance of getting a coherent weather prediction from a coven of witches as from his assembled ranks of meteorologists.
The daily conference calls between this team of meteorologists – all with conflicting methodologies – were a babble of arguments, presided over by James Stagg, a dour Scotsman who had been superintendent of Kew Observatory. Stagg had to report directly to Eisenhower as he prepared to make one of the most important decisions of the second World War.
The fate of 2½ million men and 3,000 landing craft – not to mention the fate of Europe – rested on Stagg’s team accurately predicting fair weather on a morning when the tides were right. If conditions were wrong the consequences would be disastrous.
The decision could not be put off indefinitely, as a vast flotilla had been assembled by stealth. Stagg’s team had plenty of short-term data, but in the age before computers there was no agreed metrology to compute those readings in a manner that could overcome the unpredictability of turbulence and yield an accurate five-day forecast.
Einstein once declared that before he died he hoped someone would explain quantum physics to him and after he died he hoped God would explain turbulence.
In 1944 only one person had established a mathematical ratio that might solve one of modern physics’s outstanding mysteries – the relationship between predictability and turbulence. Unfortunately for the Allies this man was Lewis Fry Richardson. The father of mathematical techniques in weather forecasting, Richardson was also a pacifist who saw the horrors of trench warfare when volunteering with a Quaker ambulance unit in Flanders, who felt obliged to resign from the Meteorological Office on grounds of conscience when it became involved in military efforts, and whose only interest in war was in trying to apply his techniques for understanding the patterns of weather turbulence to solving the underlying reasons for war between nations.
IN GILES FODEN'Sremarkable new novel, Turbulence,Richardson is reinvented as Wallace Ryman, living in self-imposed exile in a Scottish wilderness. The book's narrator is Henry Meadows, a young maths genius sent to Scotland, apparently to man a minor weather outpost but really to spy on Ryman and, if possible, discover the secret ratio that might allow the D-Day landings to be planned with some degree of certainty.
But certainty is not a given in life or in weather and, feeling occluded from destiny and unable to prove his worth, Meadows learns that the consequences of his own actions cannot be predicted. In Meadows, Foden (best known for his debut novel, The Last King of Scotland) has created a complex narrator, because we learn almost as much about him from the six-page transcript for a speech about him at the end as we do from his deliberately incomplete 341-page manuscript.
Meadows presents a succession of brilliant pen-pictures of the real-life meteorologists who fretted over that decision, from Stagg and the Norwegian Sverre Pettersen to the Americans, Benny Holzman and Irving Krick. (It was felt that no one nation should be responsible for making such a potentially disastrous prediction.)
Yet Meadows allows us only snippets of himself: the brilliant academic prodigy, the orphan who never emotionally recovered from seeing his parents in Africa drowned in the unanticipated mudslide that destroyed any semblance of a sense of home. Especially in sections set in Scotland, Meadows is at once an inward genius and outward buffoon. He lusts after two Waafs, unable to recognise them as a lesbian couple; he regularly drinks himself into oblivion to deal with his emotional inequalities and when befriending Ryman he manages – in what is virtually a schoolboy prank – to inadvertently murder the great pacifist.
YET HE FINDSthat in his own life, just as with the weather, it is virtually impossible to predict the consequences of events – his inane attempt at action kills Ryman, but also leads to the vital downing of a German spy aircraft. He blunders as he becomes central to that D-Day decision, but only through blundering is any discovery made.
Foden's novel becomes quietly gripping in its race against time. Turbulencegrows into a fascinating multi-layered novel that catapults us into the mindset of a genius, who sees patterns within every seemingly random event – be it a puff of tobacco smoke, steam from a kettle or leaves blown about the street. He is a man who may blunder in life but constantly strains to understand the whys and wherefores of the bigger picture, the patterns that can be drawn from the seemingly random storms of the natural environment or the human heart, the way that the soul shields itself from being buffeted but still follows a pattern back, via the places of loss and love, to the hidden Africa that Meadows carries in his soul from boyhood.
- Turbulence,By Giles Foden, Faber, 353pp, £16.99
Dermot Bolger is a poet, novelist and playwright whose latest play, The Consequences of Lightning, runs in the Axis, Ballymun, until May 30th