Turbulence
By Giles Foden
Faber £16.99, 353 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

It’s always fascinating to see a new genre emerge out of the seething brew of British fiction. Turbulence bubbles up as a distinguished representative of a literary niche we don’t yet have a name for. Let me propose “Real-Science Fiction” (hereafter RSF).

Put simply, RSF is heavily researched fiction which gives the reader a science lesson coated, for easy swallowing, in the traditional narrative sugar and spice.

A pioneer in the genre was Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, which danced around a paradox explicated by Stephen Hawking: theoretically, time can go backwards as well as forwards. Ian McEwan’s Saturday was founded on intensive study of modern brain surgery and cognitive psychology. Ditto Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and human genetics.

Turbulence takes as its central event “the most important weather forecast in history”, for the D-Day Landings. The timing depends on that most perverse of things – the British weather. Worse than that, British weather in June.

History is littered with “hope for the best” military campaigns which came to grief because of stinking weather. “Deus afflavit” (“God breathed”) was the inscription on the triumphal medal struck by the Elizabethans after the Spanish Armada was blown to disaster. Lest God blows in Hitler’s favour, it is essential that the greatest amphibious operation in history has a “fair wind for France”. Will it?

Turbulence’s high-suspense plot provides the answer. The Americans, under their lead meteorologist, Colonel Don Yates, favour an analogue system – looking at past patterns for future likelihoods. The British, under Professor James Stagg, are predictive. They want to “compute” probabilities. Ike, the Commander in Chief (who has a cameo part in the novel), doesn’t care what nationality of brain produces his forecast – so long as it’s right.

A brilliant young meteorologist, Henry Meadows, is dispatched to spy on an even more brilliant senior meteorologist, holed up in the Scottish Highlands.

Wallace Ryman has devised a mathematical calculus (“Ryman numbers”) which can predict the “corridors” between bouts of turbulence. But he has become a militant pacifist and wants nothing to do with the war. How will Henry get the vital information out of him? He picks up some tantalising clues. But by a sublime accident (involving explosive weather balloons) Henry unintentionally kills Ryman. The scene in which he does so is as intricate and as skilfully told as the balloon death that opens McEwan’s Enduring Love.

As he did in The Last King of Scotland with Idi Amin, Foden artfully weaves real life characters into his fictional narrative. James Stagg and Don Yates are “historical”. Ryman is fictional but based, as the afterword tells us, on “Lewis Fry Richardson, one of the unsung heroes of British science” (and a distant relative of Foden’s).

Prominent in the novel, as a comic subplot, is the unsung maddest scientist of the 20th century, Geoffrey Pyke. One of Churchill’s “wizards”, Pyke sold the Great Man on his scheme for gigantic aircraft-carriers carved out of Arctic ice – supervessels which would be immune to both U-Boat torpedo or Luftwaffe bomb. Pyke drifts in and out of Henry’s life like one of his beloved icebergs. Believe it or not, one is told that Pyke’s icy Titanics would have worked. Mountbatten kyboshed them.

In his epigraph, Foden invokes Henry James and Joseph Conrad. His narrative has a framework, three decades after the war, reminiscent of that in Heart of Darkness, told many years after the events with Kurtz in the jungle.

Like that novel, Turbulence is a classy page-turner, with a terrific D-Day climax. What distinguishes it from the run of readable war novels is that Foden is so effortlessly instructive about an off-puttingly technical subject. One comes away from Turbulence knowing the difference between a psychrometer and a hygrometer and what they are used for, and between “laminar flow” and “whirling flow”. By the time one gets to page 209 and Henry’s eureka ejaculation “the issue of adjacency is the key” one murmurs to oneself – yes, by God, “adjacency”; just what I was thinking.

Turbulence is top-notch RSF. It’s also, I suspect, good history. By coincidence (a happy accident for both titles) it comes out in the same month as the big history bestseller of the season, Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. Prepare to pack two books for the beach this summer – particularly if you’re going to northern France.

John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, and author of ‘The Boy who Loved Books’ (John Murray)