Turbulence by David Szalay review – stark tales of life in flux

A series of stories arranged around plane journeys creates a close-up portrait of our common humanity

David Szalay’s characters travel relentlessly, but are never at home. They felt this lack particularly keenly in his 2016 Man Booker-shortlisted novel-in-short-stories, All That Man Is, which moved through the stages of nine different men’s lives, the gulf between their alpha-male aspirations and daily reality experienced variously as outrage, sorrow and cosmic alienation. As European men, they were told the world belonged to them: instead they found themselves knocked off course by shyness, by loss of status, by the humiliating grind of hard graft or old age. From a teenage InterRailer to his fading grandfather, across Europe via hotels and motorways, budget airlines and cruise ships, Szalay patiently built up a brilliantly unsparing portrait of masculinity and its dark shadow, misogyny.

This new 12-story cycle, Turbulence, stretches its horizons to encompass the entire globe, as well as the female perspectives rigorously excluded from his previous book. Putting a girdle round the Earth in just 130-odd pages, it’s inevitably a much leaner work, written in a brisk, authoritative past tense rather than a layered and shifting present. Neatly organised as a series of plane journeys in which the narrative focus is passed between a dozen different characters, it begins and ends in London with a stifled fiftysomething Englishman awaiting the results of his cancer treatment. “Ironic, mocking and evasive”, Jamie is a familiar Szalay character, forced at last to accept his daughter’s insistence that “some things are serious. Which is frightening.” In between we spend time with a Senegalese businessman, an Indian caretaker living in Qatar and a Hong Kong academic, among others.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2AeVvuf

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