Giles Foden’s latest novel, released to co-incide with the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings, is a good example of how a writer can take one small aspect of something momentous, in this case weather forecasting for an invasion, and develop it to form the backbone of an impressive story. Turbulence centres around the Allies’ desperate need to accurately predict the weather in the English Channel in June 1944, to select the optimum window for the biggest amphibious operation in history, and the journey takes us via Scotland in the company of Harry Meadows, a gauche young Cambridge academic, with the events being recounted much later by Meadows as he takes part in an unlikely scientific undertaking that’s fascinating in its own right.

Meadows was an academic meteorologist whose talents were severely under-utilised in his lowly Met Office position, vital though his work is to the war effort – Foden does a good job of impressing on the reader just how important weather forecasts were, and what lengths all sides went to to collect data. Plucked from obscurity, he is ostensibly sent to operate a new weather station – but his real mission is to befriend Wallace Ryman, a genius, a polymath, but unhelpfully for the war, a pacifist (and based on a real person). Ryman has a theory about how to predict and model that most random and unpredictable of physical phenomena, turbulence, and Meadows has to find out what it is and how to use it in time for Operation OVERLORD.

Needless to say, instability and unpredictability are not limited to weather events, especially in wartime – Meadows initially gets off on the wrong foot with Ryman and his wife, but eventually makes progress. He is despairing of achieving his real goal, and reluctant to betray a man he is coming to think of as a friend, when a freak event seemingly puts paid to his mission. Back in London, passed from one project to another, Meadows seems to be out in the cold, until he is handed the poison chalice of working on the team that has to reconcile competing weather forecasts for the invasion planners, with real life-and-death consequences – and where the discoveries of his time in Scotland may be put to use after all.

Even though the reader is well aware of the outcome of D-Day, Foden does a good job of ratcheting up the tension as the invasion window approaches, and the meteorological perspective on these events was a new and enjoyable one for me. Foden’s blend of narrative drive with intriguing and unusual characters is an effective one that puts this book a cut above the average historical novel. While Turbulence didn’t quite capture me as a truly great novel might have done, perhaps because Harry Meadows is not the easiest character to like, perhaps because the ultimate outcome of events is known, it is still a very enjoyable and worthwhile read.

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