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(More customer reviews)(4.5 stars) Set in London and Scotland from January through June, 1944, this unusual and fascinating novel may change the way you think of the weather and how long-range forecasts are made. Henry Meadows, a young academician at Cambridge with a doctorate in mathematics/physics, has been studying fluid dynamics and the idea of turbulence--complex and constantly moving flows which create unpredictable effects and which have, to date, made long-range forecasting of the weather virtually impossible. Wanting to help the country's war effort, he joins the Central Forecasting Unit of the Meteorological Office, and is eventually sent to Scotland. His job is to help forecast weather patterns over a five-day period for fifty miles of German-occupied French coastline so that an invasion can be planned and a window of opportunity identified for D-Day.
The foremost expert on turbulence and its seemingly "random" effects is Wallace Ryman, a famed mathematician whose "Ryman number" could help with long-range weather forecasting, but Ryman is also a pacifist who does not want his research used for warfare. Henry Meadows hopes to convince him to share the application of his "Ryman number" in the pursuit of a weather equation to aid in meteorological forecasting. Setting up several hundred weather stations on land and sea from Iceland to the French coast, a distance of twelve hundred miles, scientists hope they can gather enough information that, with the application of the Ryman number, they can then predict the weather accurately five days in advance. Over 2.5 million men and three thousand landing craft are depending on the accuracy of this forecast.
Foden uses real people as his models for the characters in the novel. Main character Wallace Ryman is the fictional equivalent of a real man, Henry Fry Richardson, whose real life (and "Richardson number") closely parallels that of Ryman (except in the manner of his death). The other named characters (including Geoffrey Pyke and Sverre Petterssen) are also real. Where the novel may raise some questions for some people is in the subplots. Some "researchers" here believe that the formula for dealing with turbulence in the weather can also be applied to problems in sociological and interpersonal relationships--from the tendency of countries to go to war to the disagreements among lovers. This makes the subplots seem sensational and unrealistic, at times, an attempt to show that the "random" events and coincidences in our personal lives may not be random at all.
The opinions of a cleric with whom Ryman argues about God's will, scientific issues which have not yet been resolved (a solution for the problems of the Rh factor, for example), and the desire to find one formula which will explain the as yet unexplainable future, raise serious metaphysical questions but do not necessarily provide insights or answers. Filled with vibrant descriptions, an assortment of characters whose views of the world differ greatly from that of the twenty-first century, a setting that reflects a critical moment in time, and philosophical/scientific themes and insights very unusual in fiction, Turbulence is a novel which manages to raise questions and explore them in dramatic new ways. Mary Whipple
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