Turbulence

[sawyl]

Having already been rude about the science, I think I owe a few words about Giles Foden's Turbulence, a novel that blends fact and fiction together to create a history, or possibly an alternate history, of the meteorology behind the D-Day landings in a way that is mildly enjoyable but not unproblematic.

The book opens with the central character, the fictional Met Office man Henry Meadows, dispatched to Scotland ostensibly to run an observation station but in reality to butter up the scientist Wallace Ryman, a thinly fictionalised version of Lewis Fry Richardson, whose equations promise to uncover the secrets of turbulence — secrets that could prove crucial to the timing of D-Day.

The Scottish part of the book passes fairly slowly. Initially Ryman keeps himself at a distance from Meadows, who passes the time by drinking heavily and trying to work out why a couple of artistic lesbian WRENs aren't terribly interested in sleeping with him. Gradually, though, relations with the Rymans start to thaw, with the Prophet providing some cryptic hints about his methods and the Prophet's wife describing Ryman's (Richardson's) famous forecasting factory — an idea made all the more wonderful because it very neatly describes the way global forecast models are decomposed on parallel computers.

After a shocking incident brings his time in Kilmun to a sudden end, Meadows is recalled to London and, after a brief stint working on an ice ship, assigned to work with James Stagge, head of an international group of forecasters at SHAEF. Here a range of famous characters, including Eisenhower, wander around in the background while Stagg, Yates and Pettersen argue over the weather while Meadows, determined to demonstrate the value of Ryman's methods, tries his hand at numerical weather prediction.

With the energy and tension of D-Day to drive the plot along, the second part of the book works better than the first. This is probably intentional: Foden using the weather to represent the emotional events of the story. Thus the stable air mass of Kilmun is replaced by the unstable stormy conditions of the landings, while Meadows' apparently innocent actions have chaotic knock-on effects, causing turbulent eddies of events which in turn cause yet more eddies. Ultimately the turbulence of the title is as much emotional as it is meteorological.

In the final analysis, I'm not really sure that Turbulence really worked for me. I had problems with the character of Meadows, who never really felt like a genuine scientist with an enthusiasm for his subject — cf. Lawrence Waterhouse, particularly in the Qwghlm sections, in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon for a demonstration of how to write a convincingly nerdy scientist. The science didn't entirely convince and there are a couple of glaring technological errors, but these can be easily ignored. But the most significant problem is, as mentioned, the pacing: the long first section really drags, making it far too easy to become bored and give up.