What she hated about even mild turbulence was the way it ended the illusion of security, the way that it made it impossible to pretend that she was somewhere safe. She managed, thanks to the vodka, more or less to ignore the first wobble. The next was less easy to ignore, and the one after that was violent enough to throw her neighbour's Coke into his lap. And then the pilot's voice, suddenly there again, and saying, in a tone of terrifying seriousness, “Cabin crew, take your seats.”
I read David Szalay's Man Booker-nominated All That Man Is (a collection of tenuously linked short stories that didn't quite qualify as a novel in my mind), and his latest, Turbulence, is sort of the same: consisting of very brief sketches of (mostly) unrelated character's lives, the actions of each ripple into the next story (each set in a different country), and on and on, like a shockwave of turbulence jolting its way through the entirety of the human narrative. Each chapter may be brief, but Szalay captures a moment of something very true and real in each; the line-by-line writing is precise and flawless. As characters fly around the world, Szalay believably switches up settings and cultures; but as different as these societies are, people are people everywhere. On the one hand, this message is demonstrated well, and on the other, sometimes Szalay's “message” became too overt for me. Overall: a brief read that packs a punch. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Despite the book eventually travelling all around the world, there is one British family that ties it all together – and their diaspora says something interesting about modern life. In the opening piece (and opening quote), an elderly woman is flying home to Madrid after spending some weeks with her middle-age son as he went through radiation treatments for prostate cancer. Eventually, we meet this man's ex-wife – who initially plays a minor role in a chapter set in Qatar – as she visits her adult daughter in Budapest, and in the final chapter, this daughter visits her father at his home in London. Nothing is explained about why this family lives so far apart from one another, but the ways in which they're shown to live their lives speaks volumes about the types of people they are. And if, by the end, the reader doesn't get Szalay's point about how interconnected we all are, he shows the daughter reading the framed JFK quote that her father has always had in his flat:
For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.Those particular concerns – the welfare of our children and our own mortality – recur throughout the stories, so it felt a little heavy-handed to me to have this stated so pointedly near the end of the book. I also didn't believe the following, an interaction between two lower-classed sisters in India after one discovers the other's husband has hit her:
She said, leaning towards her sister so that their noses were almost touching, “There's a phrase for this now. It's 'toxic masculinity'.” She said the words in English, and Nalini didn't understand them, so she tried to find a Malayalam equivalent. “That's what they call it now. And you can't just take it,” she said. “You can't. Okay?”I did like that Ursula (the ex-wife of the British man, above) enjoys showing off her liberal bona-fides to her friends by talking about the fact that her daughter was dating a Syrian refugee (especially ironic in light of the ways that she treats her servants at home in the emirate), and I liked the turn that her attitude took when she discovered that her daughter intended to marry the man:
Ursula wanted to ask her daughter how she could be sure he didn't have a family back in Syria – a wife, kids, whatever. There was no way of knowing. Ursula had thought about it just that morning on the plane from Doha. There used to be a time when flights from the Gulf to Europe flew over Iraq and Syria – that was the shortest way – only now they had to avoid the sky over those places and fly over Iran and Turkey instead. She had watched, on the seatback screen, her own flight do just that this morning, divert around Syria and Iraq, and she had thought of Moussa, of course, and of his unknown life down there, in that secret place – a place so secret it wasn't even possible to fly over it and look at it from ten thousand metres up. What had he left behind there? What ties did he still have? Impossible to say.As much as I liked the subtle shift in Ursula's attitude when she learns her daughter has become more serious about her Syrian boyfriend, I don't know if I believed that the girl's father, upon hearing the news of the impending nuptials, would blurt out, “He's not some nutcase is he? ...some Islamic nutter?” (Although we are told that he's frightened of his cancer and not quite himself.) So overall: Where Szalay was showing me people living incredibly well-drawn scenes from their lives, I totally got his message about the interconnectedness of the human family – and especially in these days of rapid intercontinental travel. But I didn't need the message stated overtly, and that detracted from my overall enjoyment. Still a four star read.
