Another Airline Disaster Novel Disaster from John Nance
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Author: John Nance
Title: Turbulence Genre: thriller Say, you ever heard the one about the guy who kept hitting himself in the head with a hammer? A passerby asked the headbanger, "Doesn't that hurt?" and he replied, "Yes, but it feels so good when I stop!" Reading a John Nance novel is a similar experience: you feel much like you're bouncing a sixteen-pound sledge off your skull repeatedly, but it feels oh! so fine to lay that book on the nightstand for the last time. In this respect, Turbulence is no different from the last Nance novel I read (Headwind), except that perhaps it's a tad worse. You might ask if I'm normally this masochistic: I'm not, but I thought I should give Nance's work a second chance on the assumption that anyone who's consistently on the best-seller list must have some modicum of talent. I was wrong. As regards any future reading, John Nance is definitely a case of "two strikes, you're out!" But I'm sure you'd like to know why... The Plot de Tutti Plots Meridian Air's Flight Six -- bound for Cape Town, South Africa out of London -- is much more a flying circus than anything Monty Python ever conceived. The harridan chief flight attendant hates all the passengers (when she's not staring at them, looking for the face of her long-dead father); the milquetoast co-pilot hates the pilot; and the captain is a prime example that the Peter Principle is alive and kicking in modern corporations. For equipment, the airline insists on sending out a plane with a history of recurrent false fire alarms in one engine. Among the passengers is a cashiered physician who just recently brought a $120-million suit against the airline for the wrongful death of his pregnant wife (a Meridian pilot refused to land when she became ill and she died in mid-air). That 747 is an airborne petri dish for a case of mass air rage; a mid-air riot just waiting to happen. At the same time, halfway around the world, a joint CIA/DoD team has become convinced that an Iraq-based terrorist cell's next attack will be on a European capital, using a civilian airliner as a Trojan Horse to deliver an unspecified weapon of mass destruction. When Meridian Six suddenly goes radio silent, its last communication a cryptic satellite telex about a riot in the passenger cabin, that terrorist plot looks to be underway. A cunning Nigerian rebel commander, an equally cunning USAF Reserve colonel, a squadron of Libyan MiGs, and a wing of U. S. Navy Tomcats (I feel the need! for speed!!) play a deadly game of cat and mouse as a plane that may -- or may not -- be full of sleeping passengers drones on through the North African night skies. Nance Can Almost Do it All Of John Nance's plot for Turbulence, I can only say that someone once described such prose as "the house gave a lurch as termites finished the east wing" school of typing. Stupidities abound, building a prime example of what Roger Ebert, when speaking of movies, calls an "idiot plot." Mistake follows mistake. Disaster piles on disaster -- Irwin Allen's most florid fare pales alongside Nance's maunderings: A perfectly airworthy plane makes an emergency landing on a remote jungle airstrip smack-dab in the middle of a firefight. A casual thump on a bulkhead sends an improperly secured bassinet tumbling, baby and all. A lucky bullet knocks out not only all radio communication on an airliner, but takes out the satellite telephone as well (I thought those systems were redundant?). Nowhere among three hundred passengers is there anyone with a cellular telephone. Wildly coalescing strands of coincidence and stupidity braid so tightly that they strangle any stray vestiges of plot. As for the characters? they sleepwalk through the pages as if drawn there by Hanna-Barbera: bright, over-simplified personas as caricatured as those "draw your picture for $5" cartoons one purchases at charity carnivals. Each passenger and crew member displays but a single character trait: an angry doctor, an insecure pilot, a queen-bitch flight attendant, a frantic new mother. Supporting flat characters couldn't be more stereotypical if Nance had intended satire: the reserved English gentleman, the hick Texans, the aging Air Force reserve officer who's amazingly successful with beautiful women forty years his junior (perhaps Nance intended this as his version of an Alfred Hitchcock cameo appearance). And then there's the writing: choice and order of words, the subtle nuance of language. Consider this gem: The hurt had oozed into his personality like primordial mud, encasing and calcifying the chasm within, taking the form of the compassion that had once lived there. That particular sentence can be found in the prologue, but things don't get any better over the next 398 pages. Parting Shots Cheap Topicality: Turbulence was published in Spring of 2002 (personally, I find it fitting that the publication date was April 1). Given the way in which the publishing industry works, the manuscript's been in the pipeline since late 2000. It's insulting that Nance found it necessary to graft on gratuitous mention of the events of September 11, in about every second chapter. To make matters worse, they've been inserted poorly, standing our like the proverbial sore thumb. Attempting to be topical has simply hashed the plot even further. This Guy's an Expert?: Nance is an "aviation expert," trotted out by at least one television network whenever there's airline news. He is, according to his website, both a lawyer and a commercial airline pilot who flies 737s for a major airline. One would assume that he knows the standardized color for a cylinder of oxygen (green). But he doesn't; at least twice he refers to the cylinders as yellow -- the masks may be yellow, but oxygen cylinders are green. Just Plane Insulting: the egregious incompetence and surliness of the Meridian employees is way over the top. As a professional in the airline industry, Nance ought to be ashamed for even conceiving such an organization. Recommendations: Return your seats and tray tables to full upright and locked position. Wait until the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign. Once you're inside the terminal, please check the monitors for gate changes and current information on your connecting flight. Walk past the airport kiosks selling this book. Walk past them very, very fast and leave Turbulence right where it is! all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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