Close sitemap Friday 28 August 2009 Rosemary Goring Forget the pram in the hall.
For every orgasm a writer enjoys, he can kiss goodbye to a chapter, said Balzac. Marriage, in other words, is bad for the creative juices. Giles Foden, who sardonically informed his audience of Balzac’s view (“he got his priorities wrong”), has personally found the nuptual state beneficial. Quite apart from connubial bliss itself, Foden’s father-in-law is one of the world’s top meteorologists, an expert in that fiendish aspect of weather known as turbulence. This just happens to be the title of Foden’s latest novel. As generals prepared for D-Day, a handful of forecasters was mustered to predict a three-day calm spell in which the fleet could sail.
Foden’s novel is the story of those men. They were under such pressure, he said, that one of them vomited over the weather charts.