Review - Turbulent Wake by Paul E Hardisty #Blogtour #RandomThingsTours

Turbulent Wake
Paul Hardisty
Orenda Books, 16 May 2019
PB, 258pp

I'm grateful to Orenda for a free advance copy of Turbulent Wake and to Anne Cater of Random Things Blogtours for inviting me to take part in the tour.

Turbulent Wake is a bit of a departure by Hardisty. His previous books for Orenda have been popular thrillers featuring soldier, mercenary, and all-round tough guy Claymore Striker. Turbulent Wake is more reflective, consciously literary, following two mens' - a father and a son - journeys through life and relationships. There is no plot, no threat, at the centre of this story apart from the harm we do to ourselves and others and the bruises that life inflicts. A secondary theme - heartbreakingly realised in places - is environmental devastation caused by greed and stupidity, and the beauty of what we are, it seems, about to thoughtlessly lose.

This change of direction is clearly something of a risk, but Turbulent Wake fully justifies that - while it was obvious from his previous books that Hardisty could write, this one shows him engaging critically with issues of living, with the pain of living,  and he does it brilliantly.

The book's title, a physics reference, is apt (Hardisty often adopts science based titles). Turbulence is what happens when the easily modelled, "smooth" behaviour of fluids breaks down and you get churning, chaotic results. Run a liquid down a wide smooth channel relatively slowly and you can easily calculate its behaviour at any point. Increase the speed relative to the size of the channel, or replace the fluid with a thinner one, and there comes a point where the flow stops being smooth and becomes hard to model and predict. It's a fundamental issue for physics with practical consequences for the design of ships, turbines, aircraft and other machines whose operation depends on understanding how fluids work.

In this book it is, I think, a model for life. Neither of the two men we meet here is in that predictable state of laminar flow. Unexpected eddies, changes in the parameters of their lives, changes in themselves, keep them off balance and a great deal work will be required if they are to understand what is happening and, perhaps, control it. Or at least, live at peace with it.

That work is being undertaken by Warren, the father. Dying, he completes a manuscript describing his life, in what is essentially a series of vignettes. This is read by his son Ethan, mainly during plane journeys and a business trip to Geneva. Warren seems to have been out of Ethan's life for decades, and his writing attempts, perhaps, to explain why this was, or at least, how it happened.

Warren is rarely named in the writings, rather he is "the boy", "the young man", later "the young engineer", "the engineer" - and inevitably, "the old engineer". This gives the effect of almost making him absent in his own narrative - often the stories could be simply that, self-contained Hemingway-esque narratives about a tough, manly life of the old sort: working on oil wells, dams, getting into fights, being with women. Even the episodes from childhood fit into that pattern, referencing wars, a horrific assault, the formation of a distinctly patriarchal outlook. It's interesting how "the engineer" seeks out projects around the world, bits of work where an aspect of the natural world can be managed, subdued, processed - almost as if a substitute for human contacts and relationships (while there are plenty of the latter, he will, one comes to suspect, always sabotage them before they get too close).

The irony is that while "the engineer" tells himself he is trying to "do good",  it becomes increasingly clear through the book that Warren's life, spent in what he refers to in the final story as "All the Good Places", is steady eroding and destroying that natural world. There are numerous examples; logging, oil drilling destroying local water supplies, a dam that will both obliterate fragile ecology and dispossess local people, the almost too hard to bear description of a beautiful, life-filled coral reef about to be razed just to house a marina. That sense of loss is articulated by Helena, who is with Warren for a period; she simply feels that there are too many people and that they only do harm. Given this destruction, and the catastrophes of his personal life, perhaps all he has done has been for nothing?

So much for Warren. What about Ethan? It's his voice that frames this book. Ethan is clearing up his father's affairs, having a difficult time with his ex (they have a daughter who becomes a pawn between them) and slowly, oh so slowly, going off the rails in his corporate world. The book strongly pushes the reader to compare and contrast the father, an outdoorsy type who may be blundering through life but at least knows where he's coming from, and son, whose environment is the air-conditioned office and the departure lounge. Ethan doesn't, on the whole, know where he's coming from. Both had absences in parenting, both had a missing brother (the explanations for which are profound but given almost incidentally and not in much detail). The book suggests that aspects of Ethan's messed up life go back to what his father has done or not done (Larkin's famous couplet certainly applies here) but it's unclear whether the knowledge imparted by Warren's testament will be enough to mend the damage.

While fascinating as characters, both father and son are often difficult to like as people. The father's almost performative manliness (for example his solution to most problems is to thump someone) feels very old-fashioned now but is probably in keeping with the spirit of his age and life (in places it's a bit "Mad Men in the Great Outdoors"). The son''s version of that is, though, definitely out of step with his time. It has soured into a vein of office misogyny, of whining about how women are getting the promotions instead of him. Both have, one feels, some work to do on themselves and as I have said, that is what we see the father doing through his writing. Whether, and how, the son will try and move forward (and break the cycle?) is left open at the end of the book. With the onset of turbulence, it's hard to predict what will happen downstream.

Though in places Turbulent Wake isn't for the fainthearted, it is a thoughtful, chewy book that tells the story of its times through one of the most fundamental human relationships - parent and child - and doesn't spare us the dark bits there will be in any such relationship. I'd strongly recommend it, and I will be VERY interested to see what direction Hardisty takes next.

The tour for Turbulent Wake continues, with further stops at all the brilliant blogs shown on the poster. You can buy the book now from your local bookshop, including via Hive books, from Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon and doubtless other places besides.

Number 11 by Jonathan Coe

Number 11, or Tales that Witness Madness
Jonathan Coe
Viking, 2015
HB, 351pp

I bought my copy from Wallingford Bookshop.

Several years ago Jonathan Coe wrote in The Guardian about his book What a Carve Up!, published in 1994. Number 11 is a sequel, of sorts, to WACU but you won't need to have read that to enjoy it. (I haven't). Indeed Coe gives the game away, including an extract from the notebooks of a dead film critic:

"Rachel turned to the 'W' section and soon found What a Whopper.

Lame British comedy, she read, about a bunch of beatniks who travel to Loch Ness to build a model of the monster.

1962. Sequel to What a Carve Up! (1961)? Not really. Two of the same actors.

*Sequels which are not really sequels. Sequels where the relationship to the original is oblique, slippery."

Number 11 includes many references to the Winshaw family, five of whom apparently dies a violent death in the earlier book, and indeed there are some actual living, breathing Winshaws, and there is some thematic continuity between the books, both of which (again, judging WACU from reviews and from what Coe himself has written about) are pretty scathing of right wing, free market politics and those who support it. But if it is sequel, it is definitely a sequel which is not really a sequel.

Coe's 2011 essay (part of which is repeated and put into the mouth of a character here) alone would make this clear. While WACU may have been satire, Coe argued that satire let the powerful and privileged off the hook. Like a court jester, perhaps, it enables frustrations and tensions to be discharged with no dangerous effects, ultimately frustrating the urge for change. It's hard to imagine Coe committing satire after that.  The book is certainly scathing in places about 21st century life - about those who seek to put a price on everything (the widow of that dead film critic writes a book called Monetizing Wonder), about the super-rich whose investment homes are killing parts of London, about clickbait journalists, reality TV, the need for food-banks and tax avoidance (to give only a few).

But the scathingness(?) is part of a dialogue that Number 11 seems to hold with itself. There is no escape to a golden past. The film critic was obsessed with tracking down an old black and while short he saw once, as a schoolboy, in the 60s and his widow Laura sees this as a simply a yearning for a safe, lost world, free from multichannel TV, safe from choice. "The whole thing that defined the situation , and the whole beauty of it, as far as he was concerned, was passivity. Other people were making choices for him." So determined is Laura to keep her small son from looking back to a golden childhood that she seems to go out of her way to make his life unpleasant.

The loss of innocence - or the absence of innocence - seems the dominant theme in the book, repeated and reworked in countless ways from the death of David Kelly to the crushing of a faded singer's hopes of a comeback via a celebrities-in-the-jungle show to a friendship between two young women destroyed by a misunderstanding over Snapchat.

Those two women form the core of the book: one of them, Rachel, is seen at the beginning with her brother. She about to suffer a disillusionment even then. Rachel then appears as the force behind the story, writing down what has happened to her in order to make sense of it, before her friend Laura is introduced. With digressions to bring Rachel's friend Alison and her mum Val (the ex-singer) and Rachel's university tutor (Laura) the book moves through a variety of narrators and forms.  There are emails, newspaper articles and a section that seems to be imitating a sub Sherlock Holmes detective story - until either Coe tires of that game or his excellent writing reasserts itself and banishes the pastiche.  All this is unified by the constant recurrence of the number 11 (as a house number, on a a bus, the lowest level of a basement extension, a table number at an awards dinner...)

Without that thread, one might begin to regard this as a series of linked short stories rather than a single novel, albeit a series with many characters in common. Indeed Coe is almost wasteful in the way he drops characters and situations. I'd like to have learned more about some of them: there could be a whole book in Laura's life, perhaps, or that of her husband Roger with his obsessive hunt for that film, The Crystal Garden (let alone the Mad Bird Woman of Beverley or the Chinese immigrant Lu). Perhaps Coe will write some of these books - he does seem to have a habit of picking things up again (as Number 11 itself shows).

However the sheer heterogeneity of the book does make it very hard to come to an overall judgement. I think perhaps the most apposite verdict would be that of Miss Jean Brodie: for those that like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.

For my part I loved it and after a slow start in the first part of the first section, ended up reading it in longer and longer chunks, finally enthralled by the ending (though I'm still not sure what actually happened). Others perhaps will stick to the verdict Coe cites in that essay: "It's become a matter of honour for most reviewers in this country (and many readers) to remind me as often as possible that What a Carve Up! is my best novel...."

Right, I'm off now to read What a Carve Up! and see what the fuss was about.