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Turbulence (2009)

by Giles Foden

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20419132,405 (3.35)19
The D-day landings--the fate of 2.5 million men, three thousand landing craft and the entire future of Europe depend on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing on an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead? Wallace Ryman has devised a system that comprehends all of this--but he is a reclusive pacifist who stubbornly refuses to divulge his secrets. Henry Meadows, a young math prodigy, is sent to Scotland to uncover Ryman's system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined. When Henry meets Gill, Ryman's beautiful wife, events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control.--From publisher description.… (more)
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2.5 stars.

There was so much in this book that would have been more interesting than what Foden actually wrote about. Habbakuk (version 1 or 2)? The science of peace? The discovery of the rhesus factor and its role in miscarriages? Lev the mine-hunting sealion?

Instead, Foden chose to write about a sexually frustrated, socially awkward, white male academic, with a smattering of ill-explained meteorology. The narrative jumps around from present to past (WW2) to even further past (Meadows' childhood in colonial Africa) with the turbulence of the title, making it much more difficult to read than it needed to be.

Yawn. ( )
  a-shelf-apart | Nov 19, 2019 |
Using weather as a metaphor can be tricky business. One of the worst sentences I've read in years invoked a "restless silver sky." F. Scott Fitzgerald on the other hand used it to noted effect in The Great Gatsby. The risk for a writer may be even greater when weather is the central allegory.

Giles Foden takes that chance with Turbulence, a novel built around the difficulties of accurately forecasting the weather for D-Day. Although at times too obvious, Foden avoids flogging the reader with the dual meaning of the title, in part because he displays and expresses how some individuals are awed and enthralled by science.

Set largely in January through June 1944, the core plot is relatively simple. The narrator, Henry Meadows, is Cambridge educated in math and physics but ends up working for Britain's Meteorological Office during World War II. He is assigned to a unit that is tasked with providing an accurate weather forecast for a five-day period for 50 miles of the French coast to plan and launch the D-Day invasion. Although not in its infancy, at the time weather forecasts beyond two or three days were frequently highly inaccurate. Meadows is sent to set up a weather station in Scotland but his real task is to attempt to get the reclusive Wallace Ryman to reveal and explain a concept he derived that can measure the turbulence of weather systems. Ryman lives nearby and now devotes his life to "peace studies."

Meadows, who specialized in fluid dynamics, is so intrigued by turbulence that he sees it -- and shows it to the reader -- in everyday settings. He sees it in rowing a boat, milk being poured into a stream and windblown snow. In explaining and exploring this fascination, Meadows also reveals his love for and infatuation with science. Yet while Turbulence examines and explains the impact of turbulence, Foden takes the term beyond the scientific meaning. Turbulence also occurs in our lives. As in the physical world, are the events of our lives random and unplanned? How does one event affect conditions that lead to another event? At what level do actions produce a result -- or turbulence? As Meadows pursues his assignment, his actions produce extraordinary consequences for himself, Dyer and Dyer's wife.

This is Foden's first novel not set in Africa, where he grew up. Still, Turbulence does a good job of giving the feel of wartime Britain. And although well written overall, Foden occasionally seems to want to make sure the reader understands the allegory. At one point, Meadows refers to eating, drinking and sex as activities to "ease the turbulence of the flesh, allowing us, briefly, apparent escape from the burden of the soul." Likewise, Meadows describes feeling "as if my very soul were being diluted by the surrounding fluid of life." Written as if it were Meadows' memoir, Foden also has a tendency for Meadows to foreshadow events. Setting up the book as a memoir also produces some rather odd, albeit interesting, bookends that frame the main story.

As with his multiple award winning novel The Last King of Scotland, Foden blends fiction and fact in Turbulence. Ryman is based on British physicist Lewis Fry Richardson, who Foden calls "one of the unsung heroes of British science." Just as Ryman developed the "Ryman number" in the book, there is actually a "Richardson number," which can be used to predict the occurrence of fluid turbulence. A variety of actual historic figures appear in the novel, such as Britain's James Stagg, America's Irving P. Kirk and Norway's Sverre Petterssen, all deeply involved in the D-Day weather forecasting. The story also involves Geoffrey Pike, a British inventor and his Project Habakkuk, an effort to build a large ship out of wood pulp and ice.

First published in Britain in 2009, Turbulence presents and explores an interesting allegory that may not have succeeded in the hands of other writers. That makes it an enjoyable read, although perhaps not highly memorable.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie)
1 vote PrairieProgressive | Aug 27, 2011 |
The only interesting character offed herself. A rule of thumb: If you want the reader to be surprised and intrigued when an illicit affair begins, start with more than three characters. ( )
  picardyrose | Apr 6, 2011 |
This novel proved to be a lovely example of serendipity at its gleeful best. I really bought this as a bit of a gamble, choosing it as the third of a "3 for 2" offer at Waterstone's. However, it proved to be an excellent choice. Set in the run up to the D-Day invasions it tells of the challenges that the Allies faced in determining ...when they would have the best weather window in which to send their armada across the Channel. The principal character is Henry Meadows, a meteorological mathematician, who is sent to see if he can convince conscientious objector Professor Ryman to explain his legendary ratio of potential to kinetic energy which determines the evolution of local and global weather systems. Ryman is clearly modelled on Lewis Fry Richardson, and Foden's handling of Fry's immensely complex maths is masterful. Did they find a suitable day for the invasion?
Was the eventual invasion successful? Don't worry, I won't give away the ending! ( )
  Eyejaybee | Jan 22, 2011 |
This book recounts the story of Henry Meadows. He is a young meteorologist sent to meet with the great Wallace Ryman in Scotland. Ryman is a thinly disguised version of Lewis Fry Richardson, a pacifist and visionary in the field of weather and forecasting. The story takes place during WWII, when Meadows is trying to get insight into forecasting in order to facilitate the timing of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

In the second half of the book, Meadows is in London and at the allied headquarters in southern England. The book takes in some of the drama of the run-up to D-Day. Needless to say, weather forecasting was a primitive science back then and it was a miracle that they got the forecast close to right. A lot was riding on it.

There is a fair amount of science in the book, especially a lot about the Ryman (Richardson) number. There is even an equation where it is defined. And the metaphor of turbulence and fluid flow permeates the book. ( )
  FredB | Jan 2, 2011 |
Showing 1-5 of 19 (next | show all)
THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF WESTERN society is increasingly being split into two polar groups… Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists, and, as the most representative, physical scientists. Between the two is a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

So declared CP Snow in his 1959 Rede Lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. He argued that responsibility for this gulf was the complacency and arrogance of the literary intellectuals, ignorantly dismissive of science. Snow himself bridged the two cultures, being a good, if now unfashionable, novelist and a scientist by training. His lecture provoked a fierce and ill-mannered response from the Cambridge literary critic FR Leavis. At the time it seemed to many that Leavis had the better of the argument, partly because he conducted it more vigorously and was not afraid to hit below the belt.

Yet a half-century later, it would seem to be Snow who has prevailed, or who has at least convinced novelists and poets that they must understand the sciences, accept that their research and development have shaped our world, and that they should be ready to write about this. There is now a fashion for writing novels with a scientific theme.

Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland, has written such a novel.

 
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The D-day landings--the fate of 2.5 million men, three thousand landing craft and the entire future of Europe depend on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing on an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead? Wallace Ryman has devised a system that comprehends all of this--but he is a reclusive pacifist who stubbornly refuses to divulge his secrets. Henry Meadows, a young math prodigy, is sent to Scotland to uncover Ryman's system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined. When Henry meets Gill, Ryman's beautiful wife, events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control.--From publisher description.

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