Becoming a high-flyer
Christopher Hawtree
NIGHT OVER WATER by Ken Follett Macmillan, £14.99, pp. 408 Needless to say, a new novel by Ken Follett which features a perilous, wartime voyage by flying-boat also contains a couple of attempts to join the mile-high club. Connoisseurs of his fiction will realise that, for once, such entanglements require some restraint. Even the opulent cabins of a flying-boat, so different from steerage in a 747, do not afford the necessary privacy for all that his characters are wont to enjoy; and even if they did, the walls might take such a battering that the aeroplane plunged into the Atlantic before there were time for others aboard to do their worst.
To portray Follett's oeuvre as a bonkerama is not entirely fair, for such varied couplings are only part of a narrative skill which, if not always operating at full thrust, brought him via Poole Technical College, Philosophy at University College, London and shipping correspondent on the Evening News to a big time which still finds room for a Stampesque interest in church architecture and an unStamplike enthusiasm for rock 'n' roll guitar.
Follett is a man who knew where he was going, but it is often forgotten how long — or, at any rate, how many books — it took to get there. This veteran of the airport bookstalls first saw the light of day with an obscure firm outside Bournemouth in the mid-Seventies. The Shakeout and The Bear Raid were modest thrillers, niftily done, which have now unfairly vanished from sight; as have — in this country — two thrillers for Collins Crime Club, The Modigliani Scandal and Paper Money, which, written under the name of Zachary Stone, display a ready wit and sense of pace. This is certainly missing from three more, each with 'Big' in the title, that were credited to Simon Myles (none of which has reached the British Museum). Rarely has there been quite as preposterous an opening to a novel as the threesome of The Big Needle which is interrupted by the arrival at dawn of a man called Apples' ex- wife and her boyfriend; no sooner has Apples heard the news that his daughter is in a drug-induced coma, then there is a cry from the other room:
Babs's Jamaican accent came through a mouthful of Annabel's aristocratic breast: 'Come to bed, Apples, we need you.'
On this showing, Follett would have continued to eke out his shipping- correspondent's pay by such means as a swift account of Spaggiari's celebrated raid upon some Nice bank vaults in 1976 (The Gentleman of 16 July has become a fugitive itself). Follett was not to be cowed. As Jack Higgins had done before him, he took stock of his prolific and pseudonymous narrative methods and lit upon investing the second world war with unknown facts. Just as The Eagle Has Landed had done, Eye of the Needle yielded its author megabucks. Unlike Higgins's fine novel, Follett's steelily precise book presaged a series which did not rework tired old methods but attempted to do something different in each yoking of disparate, worldwide elements to form a steamy whole.
If these were not always top-notch, Follett was certainly more consistent than Frederick Forsyth, who has yet even to approach the skilful suspense of his master- ly The Day of the Jackal. Only in The Key to Rebecca did Follett come seriously unstuck,
mainly because the novel depended not only upon the book-code of the title but an unlikely, repeated entrapment of a German by a willing girl. Daphne Du Maurier was none too pleased either by the use made of her work. It would have been all the more interesting to hear her view of the extraordinary, lactiferous sex scene towards the end of the later Lie Down With Lions which found Follett in the hills of Afghanistan.
Perhaps even the highly-charged Follett felt exhausted after creating such a scene, for it was some while until another novel appeared. In the meanwhile, he had a much-publicised dispute when his latest publishers, Collins (strange to think, he had also been with Christopher Sinclair
Stevenson), were taken over by Rupert Murdoch. He decided to leave, a gesture which would have been more pungent had his next novel not been The Pillars of the Earth, a 1,000-page mediaeval epic told in Eighties demotic.
He can be forgiven that wearisome folly now that Night Over Water marks a return to World War Two and top form. In seek- ing to turn a variant upon the device of strangers on a train being subject to the evil machinations of somebody unknown among their number, Follett is not the first author to hit upon a flying-boat (Richard Doyle did so in Imperial 109).
In one of those touches that an author cannot resist, Follett has Henry Faber (die Nadel of the breakthrough novel) appear briefly to set in motion a plan to see off one of those who will be New York-bound. By the time that the pilot is ready to call 'chocks away!', there will be others aboard, although one — in pursuit of his errant wife — will not join it until the craft touch- es down en route at Foynes in Ireland. Follett has evidently done his legwork, but he knows that such research — as well as post-modernism, magic realism and what- not — can be the bane of the modern novel which, so often falling back upon these trumpery devices, fails to realise that the mainspring of all fiction is the ability to create characters.
Night Over Water never appears far- fetched because — as one's own bedside clock passes midnight and enters the small hours — one believes in the jewel-thief obliged to do a bunk, as is a fifth columnist and his family fearful of incarceration or worse; already nabbed is a murderer yoked to an FBI agent; while, fearful of the immediate future, is a flight engineer in the know. All this moves apace, scarcely hindered by those feet padding between cabins in the night. If there is a moment when one recalls Richard Fleischer s splendid 1948 B-film set on a train, The Narrow Margin, even that does not detract from the succession of surprises which make for a smoothly-controlled builr landing. There is no reverse-thrust to this narrative which sedulously leads one into the dark and all that is revealed therein.
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