Before the Fall by Noah Hawley - review

If the bulk of this summer’s blockbusters are chick-lit noir aimed at women, here’s something for the boys. “A private plane sits on a runway in Martha’s Vineyard, forward stairs deployed,” it begins. It’s a hot and foggy summer evening. There are 11 people travelling on the flight back to New York and 18 minutes after take-off, the plane crashes into the Atlantic.

Only two people survive. A fortysomething man and a four-year-old boy. As helicopters search for wreckage and bodies, the FBI begins an investigation into what happened.

Narrated in the present, in interconnected chapters, we learn the backstory of each of the characters and their lives up until this moment. There is the multi-millionaire media mogul, his wife and two young children, plus their Israeli bodyguard; there is the financier — also extremely wealthy — and his wife; there is the recovering alcoholic painter who is piecing his life back together. Then there is the pilot, the first officer and the flight attendant.

As the plot develops it seems that there are plenty of people with axes to grind against the passengers and that this was no random accident, a fact that the ruthlessly opportunistic anchor man on the media mogul’s populist news channel exploits to the limit.

As we know from our own current news coverage, the media loves to jump on a story and twist according to taste. This is a brilliantly sharp and intelligent thriller from the writer of the Fargo TV series, with a depth of characterisation not unlike The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Hawley has written four previous novels. If they’re anything like this, I’ll be reading them all.