Review: Before the Fall

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I stopped reading the X-men about the same time as Charles Xavier's son, Legion turned up. I didn't like the character and although I've watched the movies, I didn't think much of Apocalypse. So I was surprised when, having watched the first episode almost by accident, I was blown away by the Legion TV series. Even more so when I discovered the series was written and created by Noah Hawley and that he is also behind the Fargo series, another I had avoided simply because I enjoyed the movie so much. And then, courtesy of Hodder & Stoughton and Netgalley, I received a review copy of the same Noah Hawley's Before the Fall. Synchronicity...?

Before the Fall is the story of Scott Burroughs, a down on his lunch artist, who accepts an invitation to travel by private jet from Martha's Vineyard to New York. When the jet crashes into the sea all but Scott and the jet-owners' four year old son are killed. Scott becomes part of, perhaps subject of, the investigation and is pursued by news agencies eager for the story. That is essentially the plot. A large part of the narrative is the backstories of the passengers - the 24-hour news mogul and his wife, the dodgy businessman, the bodyguard, the flightcrew - and how they came to be on board the doomed plane.

But plot is not what Before the Fall is about. The novel is an exquisitely written examination of life in the 21st century; what it means to be living in a society where news has to have an 'angle', where so many people base their world view on 'what's in it for me' that it becomes impossible to comprehend that someone may just act rather than act selfishly. It is in the passengers individual stories, the little connections, the seemingly unrelated choices, that lead to larger consequences, where the real weight of the book, the message, is contained -

"Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you."

Noah Hawley has a real gift for language, an ear for dialogue. Whole passages deserve re-reading, the reader's appreciation of the lyrical, mesmerising quality of the writing only grows. I will be going back to watch Fargo and The Good Father is on my to-read list and i might have missed it all had I not read the X-men....

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