Before the Fall by Noah Hawley
The Book Barmy reading list has adapted to the past couple of months of endless rain and a bout with the flu. I gravitated toward thrillers, wanting plot driven, hold your attention type escapism – as if I were on a long, mind-numbing plane trip
As with Dark Matter, Mr. Hawley, the author of Before the Fall is an award winning television writer, most famous for the strange but compelling series Fargo, so I hoped I was in for gripping story line.
Before the Fall bit me hard from the start and didn’t let go.
A private jet crashes minutes after departing Martha’s Vineyard. Just two passengers survive, an artist and a 4 year old boy. With J.J., the boy in tow secured to a seat cushion, the middle-aged painter Scott Burroughs swims across the ocean to the Long Island shore. Turns out Scott is an accomplished swimmer, inspired as a young boy witnessing Jack LaLane swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco.
The mystery of why the plane crashed is told by weaving together the crash investigation and the survivors aftermath with the backstories of the deceased passengers and crew members. The flight recorder reveals nothing amiss with the plane and it is decided that the crash was due sabotage. A classic locked room mystery, but up in the air. The mystery is unwrapped by revealing each character’s personal history and point of view.
The deceased include a financier facing federal indictment and his clueless wife; the head of a Fox-like cable news network with his wife and child; an Israeli bodyguard haunted by war; a career pilot; a hotshot co-pilot; and a flight attendant in her own life crisis.
In the aftermath of the crash, Mr. Hawley gives center stage to Bill Cunningham the larger-than-life newscaster for the cable news network. He makes the story of the plane crash and the network’s lost leader tabloid news — by asking leading questions, ignoring the facts, assuming the worst, and using illegal means to get information.
It was fascinating to see how the news was no longer the facts of what happened, it became a “story” presented to make the headlines and grab audience numbers. I cringed as Cunningham digs into the personal life of the hero, Scott Burroughs, using a hacker to monitor his private activities, which Cunningham then announces in his news broadcasts.
All this a thinly veiled, yet very relevant stab at tabloid media and Fox news
Cunningham was the angry white man people invited into their living rooms to call bullshit at the world . . . who told us what we wanted to hear, which was that the reason we were losing out in life was not that we were losers, but that someone was reaching into our pockets, our companies, our country and taking what was rightfully ours.
[He appealed to] the people who had been searching their whole lives for someone to say out loud what they’d always felt in their hearts.
Just when the mystery of the downed plane seems connected to the corrupt financier, or perhaps the mysterious bodyguard — no no, it must be connected to the news network somehow– the story line shifts to the characters’ blurred boundaries and questionable pasts. The characters, are after all, just humans – fraught with guilt, frailties, and unresolved resentments.
In the end, it’s not money or power, but human vulnerabilities which drive our actions.
Before the Fall reads like a film — it was a fast paced, entertaining and exciting thriller. And what do you know? Sony Pictures has acquired the rights to the story.
A digital advanced readers copy was provided by Grand Central Publishing via Netgalley.
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