This is the story of what happens before a private plane full of rich passengers plunges out of the sky into the ocean. It sounds like a basic air disaster but it isn’t. It is stunningly simple and stunningly clever.
In the hands of a writer like Noah Hawley, who knows how to build tension from mundane moments, it is a remarkable thriller that most readers will find difficult to put down. The author uses his crisp chapters like curtain raisers with his characters vivid in their pain. Yet simplicity is the key of the plot and that that is why it is difficult to stop reading as it moves toward a breathless ending sharpened by the well-developed irony of personal failure. Mr. Hawley operates with confidence in the world of vast wealth and those who inhabit it, those who fly with bodyguards and armor as a matter of course.
Like the Batemans, a couple who may be worth $100 million, who soared meteor-like from running political campaigns, moving to the upscale lobbying of K Street in Washington D.C., where ideas are peddled that may or not be worth their price. David Bateman winds up working for a billionaire who is never identified in the book yet is recognizable, and it is clear that while he is devoted to his wife, Maggie, a former schoolteacher, she does not share his comfort with immense amounts of money.
It tells the reader something that of their two small children — one has already been kidnapped at the age of two — and a formidable Israeli security man is permanently on the Bateman payroll to protect their four-year-old son and the rest of the family. David’s close business friend Ben Kipper, another millionaire described as a “a blue-eyed shark,” is under federal investigation and on the brink of going to prison. Even more repellent is Bill Cunningham, a powerhouse producer on television who gives amorality an even darker image. Cunningham is compared to “Kurtz in the jungle” and lives up to his reputation with his enthusiasm for tapping telephones. Also on the list of the seven passengers on the doomed plane is Emma, a flight attendant trying to extricate herself from an affair with a charming but ruthless co-pilot. Emma should not be doomed but she is.
And there is Scott Burroughs, a man who paints catastrophe, who finds himself as a casual passenger on the private plane — he muses on how much leg room is available compared with most aircraft — and who survives the crash by a fluke to become the savior of the Batemans’ four-year-old son JJ. His desperate swim to safety with the boy on his back saves the child yet plunges Burroughs into the mystery of why and how the flight crashed. It is typical of Mr. Hawley’s approach to his characters that Burroughs sees himself as an ordinary man trapped in a nightmare where he cannot even adjust to his role as a survivor and indeed as a hero. To the terrified orphan, he represents all that is left of comfort, especially since the little boy is heir to fantastic wealth and is likely to be able to trust no one in the adult world. It is not surprising that the child speaks only to Burroughs, since he is surrounded by predators like Cunningham, who is ruthless even for a television producer, and is determined to prove the existence of a conspiracy beyond the tragedy.
The book hinges on its characterization and the sensitivity which the author applies to a world that few know and even fewer can deal with and emerge unscarred. This is not a book for those seeking only clues to the climax and who did what to whom. The reader has to pay attention to the sad facts that gradually emerge in its pages. And it is worth it.
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