TLS on Weather

by Nicholas Hiley

a review of TURBULENCE by Giles Foden
A novel of the atmosphere
351pp. Faber. ¿16.99.978 0 571205226

Giles Foden's new novel focuses on the weather forecasting for D-Day, June 6, 1944. It was an intriguing historical moment, for the Allies assembled three two-man teams of forecasters, from the Met Office, the Admiralty and the United States military, to establish what Foden describes as "a safe weather forecast that would allow thousands of men to land by sea and air on a stretch of the French coast on a single day at the optimum time". Foden argues that "weather forecasters are heroes, so difficult is the task they face". He has chosen as his narrator Henry Meadows, a British meteorologist looking back at D-Day thirty-six years later. A research scientist with a Cambridge doctorate in fluid dynamics, Meadows had volunteered for the wartime Met Office from a post in the Cavendish Laboratory. He is writing his account in 1980, as he travels from the Antarctic to the Arabian desert on a ship made of ice, the realization of an abortive Second World War operation named "Project Habakkuk".

In Turbulence, General Eisenhower asks the meteorologists to find him "a good spell ... during the next month or so". In reality, meteorology was never the prime factor in deciding the date of D-Day. As early as November 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt had told Stalin that France would be invaded in May 1944. That was postponed to June as the scale of the operation grew, and the approximate day was known well in advance. The landings had to take place at low water around dawn, during a full moon, and that meant June 5, 6, or 7.
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Foden conjures up a race against time, in which "one man's prediction could change the face of the world". But in fact, the three teams of meteorologists were not asked to find good weather for D-Day, only to veto those days they believed would be bad, working just forty-eight hours ahead. On June 3, they vetoed the first date, with a two-to-one split between the teams, and were proved right. The following day they decided, initially by a two-to-one split, that they could not veto June 6, and the invasion went ahead in conditions that were only just tolerable.

Having the meteorologists as heroes makes a good story, but it creates a significant problem. Meadows is the standard fictional scientist: a figure of towering intellect, who is nevertheless well below the average reader in ordinary social skills. He admits to being inarticulate and "emotionally withdrawn", and is acknowledged to be an awkward, "childlike", "inward, unreflexive creature". The problem for the author is that this obsessive and introverted narrator has to act as a guide through the complex emotional landscape of a novel.

In fact, there is little about Meadows's narration to suggest that he is a scientist, "reducing things to their underlying values". He thinks not in equations but in images, associations and dreams - "the mind's strong poetry". He is captivated by patterns of memory "streaming from the stern as the queen of the night passes in her ghostly cloud-ship", and his lyrical evocations of an African childhood - "the rows of tobacco where they hung, lion-tawney, in the curing sheds" - are clearly Foden's own. When Meadows has to be shown doing real science, we get little more than the Hollywood standby of a quick shot of an equation followed by a sequence of dissolves. "I solved calculation after calculation", Meadows recalls breezily of the final hours before D-Day: "My hand moving quickly under the desk lamp, covering the blank sheets ...".

This absence of a scientific sensibility need not have mattered, for Foden's intention was clearly to unite the book with an overriding meteorological metaphor. In a reversal of the pathetic fallacy, he presents human emotions as a sort of weather: "a world of disintegration and endless renewal", where all that seems fixed and intelligible from one standpoint "becomes disordered and unpredictable viewed from another". We are like particles of air, moved by huge systems too vast to comprehend, and, like the D-Day planners, we peer into an uncertain future, desperate to locate order in a world where "disorder is always waiting to pounce".

Foden repeatedly invokes this metaphor, in an effort to make it work. It never does, but it still has a lasting impact because, perhaps unconsciously, Foden reduces all the characters in the novel to discrete particles. As Meadows treads his path towards D-Day, it becomes clear that Turbulence is less about prediction than about the impossibility of predicting, or indeed of imagining any lasting relationships between things or people. All the friendships here are false or undermined by jealousy, all the relationships are bleak and impermanent, and when Meadows clutches at "a dream of comfort", it results only in pain, damage and violent death.

Turbulence has indeed a barren heart. It was brave of Foden to construct a novel around the figure of an isolated and lonely scientist, telling his story on "an ice ship heading for the desert", but that bleakness has permeated the entire work. The image of Meadows labouring on Project Habakkuk, to construct a cold "Frankenstein's monster of a ship", could stand for the whole book.