Turbulence

By Giles Foden

Reviewed by George Walden - 18 June 2009

Heavy weather

Following the First World War, fashionable scientific influences on the novel included the theory of entropy, in the sense of loss of energy and decay. More recently, advances in neuroscience have teased the creative imagination. Now Giles Foden has fastened on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in the form of the lamentable absence of a satisfactory theory of turbulence to predict the weather, as the mainspring of his new novel.

Unlike the cases of entropy or neuroscience, where writers have tended to reflect woozily (and, in the view of some scientists, frequently misleadingly) on their themes, Foden confronts us directly with the mechanics of his subject. His story is about the difficulty faced by scientists trying to predict optimum weather conditions for the D-Day landings of June 1944, and is built around the lives of two scientists caught up in the real-life drama of those tense days.

Foden has based his research into the book’s key figure, Wallace Ryman, on a gifted scientist and conscientious objector called Lewis Fry Richardson, who is said to have discovered a “number”, or formula, that could successfully predict the degree of turbulence in the climate. As a pacifist, Ryman declines to impart this knowledge to the government when plans for D-Day are under way. The plot concerns the efforts of a younger scientist despatched by authority to befriend him, with a view to appropriating the knowledge.

Real science, true events, actual people: so why a novel? Why not a straightforward historical account of this fascinating sidelight on the Second World War, especially as Foden is also a writer of narrative non-fiction? It’s not as if his imaginative re-creation of these months and days spares us the science. The answer can only be that it depends on how well and how truthfully Foden the novelist does it, and it seems to me he does it well enough to justify the detour into fiction.

The narrator and junior scientist Henry Meadows is a notably successful creation. Through him, we get a strong period flavour of the averagely emotionally stoppered young man caught up in the war, with more drink and cigarettes at his disposal than women, and an understandable tendency to aimlessness and depression. Nevertheless, he does what he thinks he must, with a minimum of personal drama or heroics.

Unlike the hero of, for example, The Ghost Road, Pat Barker’s novel about the First World War, Meadows is not retrospectively constructed for our ideologically correct delectation. It was especially bold of Foden to have avoided the temptation for his hero to be seen as wavering in his loyalty to his military superiors under the anti-war blandishments of Ryman. Though himself lacking in soldierly instinct and experience, Meadows never falters in his belief that violence in the anti-fascist cause is justified.

Stylistically, the book is pleasingly dry, befitting the pinched life of the times, though Foden has a weakness for extravagant simile, as when he writes that wooden splinters on the floor “looked like arrows and spears left over from some terrible colonial massacre”. I don’t believe they did. I think it was the author straining too hard to hark back to Africa, where Meadows, like his creator, was born.

There is a deeper problem, though perhaps not of Foden’s making. Like entropy, or our wonder before the infinite number of our synapses, turbulence lends itself a little too easily to metaphysical musing. Snowflakes on a screen are “distinct only for a moment, commingled with the thread-like wisps of my thoughts as they came and went”. In less securely anchored passages, reflections on the unpredictable flux of it all get an excessive airing, though they never stop the story.

The difficulty is the fecundity of the metaphor of turbulence itself, with its all-encompassing message about the futility of seeking to impose order on what we cannot explain and the consequent need not to get above ourselves scientifically. “Where you cannot measure you must sensibly approximate. Use randomisation judiciously,” says Ryman a little mysteriously.

Those who enjoy this kind of thing will find (or imagine) in all this echoes of as many bold and blowsy philosophical concepts as you care to name – not least, it occurs to me, the Heideggerian notion of how we human beings are “thrown into the world”. Martin Heidegger was a contemporary of Werner Heisenberg, both were harbingers of postmodernism, and both, for what it is worth, were compromisers with the Nazis. You see how ungovernable turbulence can blow you about?

So it can be a mistake to reflect too deeply on what Foden seems to be telling us about the randomness in our lives, as illustrated by the way Meadows is blown about by the historical climate even as he tries to comprehend it. The risk is of falling into a sort of grandiose incoherence. Better simply to read and enjoy this thoughtful and original novel.

George Walden was a Conservative MP between 1983 and 1997. His memoir “Lucky George” was published in 1999 (Allen Lane)

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