As she does at a thousand random moments out of every day, Maggie feels a swell of motherly love, ballooning and desperate. Her identity. She reaches once more to readjust her son's blanket, and as she does there is that moment of weightlessness as the plane's wheels leave the ground. This act of impossible hope, this routine suspension of the physical laws that hold men down, inspires and terrifies her. Flying. They are flying. And as they rise up through the foggy white, talking and laughing, serenaded by the songs of the 1950s crooners and the white noise of the long at bat, none of them has any idea that sixteen minutes from now their plane will crash into the sea.I really liked the prologue to Before the Fall: with punchy sentences and sharp descriptions, engagingly sketching out all the characters with quick brushstrokes, adding in the foreshadowing, the foreboding of that final paragraph quoted above, I thought, “This is gonna be good”. But then...the rest of the book didn't really live up to this early promise for me. The writing became less sharp – with a lot of heavy-handed moralising – and the characters, when they were eventually fleshed out, somehow became more cartoonish. I had picked up this book based on this review in the NYT, where the headline proclaims this “one of the year's best suspense novels”, but here's the thing: while Before the Fall is definitely a mystery, it's not a thriller; is neither “spine-tingling” nor “ingeniously nerve-wracking”. But it wasn't just my unmet expectations that have left me disenchanted, it's the whole dumb thing.
Immediately after the prologue, we meet Scott: a middle-aged painter who has just had a major breakthrough in his art; finally making the leap from good to great. When one of the rich summer residents that he is acquainted with from around Martha's Vineyard offers him a lift to New York in her husband's corporate jet, Scott thinks he has scored the jackpot. He'll change that thinking when he finds himself regaining consciousness next to a flaming wingtip in the frigid Atlantic. Just as Scott figures out which way he should start swimming, he hears a young child crying and discovers JJ – the four-year-old son of his acquaintance Maggie – and after securing the boy more firmly to his floating seat cushion, Scott begins a gruelling eight hour middle-of-the-night swim to shore. So far, all of this was really interesting to me, and this is where the mystery begins: just what caused a perfectly sound aircraft to fall out of the sky sixteen minutes after takeoff? The narrative alternates between Scott's experiences in the present – his involvement with the crash investigators, his being hounded by news media – and flashbacks to the lives of the other passengers: did the crash have something to do with the banker on board who was to be arrested the next day? Why would a media mogul need an armed bodyguard on vacation? And should we be concerned that this “bodyman” is ex-Mossad? I thought that this format was clever and I definitely needed to read right to the end to figure out what happened; these are all good things. So why did I think this was ultimately dumb? This is a minor character explaining to Scott that JJ's older sister had been kidnapped as a baby:
Apparently, someone broke into their house and took her. She was gone for, like, a week. And now – I mean to survive something like that and then die so horribly – you couldn't make this stuff up.If you have to add a line like that, you know that you're stretching credibility, and for some reason, author Noah Hawley decided to make a point of adding a lot of “weird coincidences” to this story. I was completely charmed by Jack Lalanne's appearance in Scott's backstory: having seen the strongman pulling a boat (with bound hands!) through San Francisco Bay as a child totally explains why Scott would have become a swimming champion as a teenager; explains how, with the recent positive turnarounds in his art and life, Scott was fit enough to complete his swim to shore: this raises “coincidence” to the level of “fate”, and I'm completely onboard. I'm less onboard with the passing detail that Scott's sister had drowned as a teenager; that fact doesn't really affect the plot or Scott's psyche, but, okay. It was strange that Scott had recently started painting disaster scenes in his breakthrough artwork, but as this can tie into the fate idea and provide a plot wrinkle (with investigators wondering if Scott – who really didn't belong on that flight – might have been involved in bringing it down as part of his disaster obsession), I was less than charmed, but not outright annoyed. And then the strange fact that the flight lasted – to the second, it is stressed, from wheels up to impact – for exactly as long as the record-length twenty-two-pitch at-bat in the Red Sox game that the passengers were watching on the plane; this fact is bandied about, but in a “sometimes there are just coincidences” kind of way, and hey, you couldn't make this stuff up, right? Was there a point to saying that Gil had been born on the first day of the Six Days War? That Charlie had been born in the closing minutes of a New Year's Eve? I must say that I was annoyed that it was Hurricane Margaret (OMG! Just like Maggie!) that was heading north and threatening to disrupt the recovery efforts: once more characters are discussing that it's just a strange coincidence, but hey, you couldn't make this stuff up. And then there's the seeming point of the book:
Since when does how a thing looks matter more than what it is?As soon as Scott is released from hospital, he becomes the focus of the media circus and must go into hiding (even though publicity, especially as the hero who saved a little boy, could only help his art career). Maggie's husband was the brains behind a Fox-like 24 hour news channel with a preconceived “narrative” for the events it covered, and the lead anchor (and personal friend of the family) stays on air for days, proposing various disgusting conspiracy theories: maybe Scott was Maggie's lover, how do we know that Scott actually saved JJ in that unlikely swim, how do we know that Scott wasn't out to get his hands on the enormous fortune JJ was due to inherit...Since the book names CNN and MSNBC as on the scene, and pointedly does not name Fox, one can only assume that this is Fox, and as most readers seem to put together, this anchor is based on Bill O'Reilly, and the whole subplot of the transformation of news into entertainment at the hands of this immoral organisation comes off as a total smear job (and I'll note that I'm Canadian: I don't watch Fox or MSNBC; am outside of any debate over liberal vs conservative bias in American media; yet even I can see that this anchor is more Alex Jones than Bill O'Reilly).
And more complaints: when the backstory about the legendary bodyguard Gil Baruch included the detail, “There was a theory, prominent in the 1990s, that he had taken Angelina Jolie's virginity”, I thought to myself, “That's a tacky invention; that's an actual person you're talking about there”. And then it felt like sloppy writing to have, not many pages later, the observation that the paparazzi are often camped out at small airports to see if the private jets are carrying “Brad and Angelina”. I thought it was very odd that sometimes Hawley would namedrop actual people (Mick Jagger is referenced a couple of times) and then other times refer to a “big name director” or “a Hollywood starlet”; it was inconsistent and jarring. And then I remembered that Hawley is the showrunner on Fargo, starring Jolie's ex-husband Billy Bob Thornton, and that reference to Jolie and her virginity felt even more tacky. And then there were the implausibles: why would Captain Melody be mildly annoyed by his mother's “affected” British accent if Charlie and Gus note that Melody himself (born and raised in America) speaks like a “British ponce”? And where did Scott get his beloved fountain pen from to give to JJ? If he had left it on Martha's Vineyard, there's no mention of anyone bringing him his stuff from home (and who would have thought to pack that pen for him anyway?), and there's no way I would believe he had it in his pocket during the plane crash and it survived the swim to shore without him making note of it along the way. (I wasn't marking the things that bothered me, so these are just top of mind examples of things I didn't like.)
I thought that Hawley had some nice details in the back stories (I really liked the image of young Emma watching her Dad coldcock a guy and turn around before he fell; knowing he'd fall as soon as contact was made; every little girl should see their Dad this way just once), and if I could cut out the present day action, I'd like the book better (realising that it's the present day stuff that makes the social commentary, and therefore, is rather the point). As I said, I liked the mystery, but this book just falls apart for me in the details. Three stars is a rounding up.
