It’s hard to say if writers still have origin stories. TJ Newman wrote Falling, the jingoistic thriller about getting blackmailed into terrorism that almost displayed cognisance of the USA’s complicity in the shambolic state of the modern political atmosphere, in the downtime on long haul flights as a flight attendant. A variation of this was cribbed for the insulting fictional story for “Elly Conway”, who “wrote” Argylle between waiting tables. (I will fully admit that I spend a lot more time thinking about Argylle than most people, especially Matthew Vaughan)
Falling was a success in a time when no one was flying anywhere, let alone attempting to crash their plane into America’s beating heart. Two years later, Newman returned with Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, a different aviation disaster: a plane sinking into the ocean and the people racing against time to save the few passengers who remained aboard. Frankly, it’s a budget version of The Poseidon Adventure for people who either haven’t seen or can’t remember anything about it (there was a song; Shelley Winters was there). It’s the sort of book that you maybe don’t regret reading, but you also can’t bring yourself to think that it was very good. And it’s awfully convenient.
Shortly after taking off from Hawaii, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Multiple passengers take their chances on the hostile surface, but engineer Will Kent can tell that the plane itself is the safest place to be. When the plane sinks onto a crumbling volcanic shelf, the twelve passengers that remained aboard are in a race against time before they run out of air, drown, or sink to the bottom of the ocean. Fortunately for Will, his estranged wife is an expert diver willing to take any risks to save their daughter, Shannon, who is also aboard. It’s going to take good old American know-how and circumvention of military orders to bring Flight 1421 home.
Newman has clearly spent a lot of time ideating about all of the terrors that can befall a plane, to the point that parts of the explosion, crash, and sinking feel gratuitous. If you want a book with a body count, Drowning is definitely it. People get stabbed by flying debris, others are burned alive or impaled, and some are lucky enough simply to perish upon impact. These are the moments that Newman has rendered in the most loving detail, to the exclusion of all others. Much of the rest of the book is described in a perfunctory fashion that takes for granted that the reader will understand; as a result it is difficult to picture the angle that the plane is canted at and how the survivors are bracing themselves. The logistics of the rescue are plainly backed by science and research, but Newman has very little interest in choreographing them in an engaging way.
Of course, being trapped on a plane is dramatic enough that the drama doesn’t need to be artificially spiked. Shannon is a sage eleven year old who can spout koans like “she’s capable of more than you think,” read the subtext of her parents’ arguments, but she doesn’t have the wisdom to check if the crackers she’s been given under the sea are going to send her into anaphylactic shock. An entirely unnecessary electrocution happens under Newman’s watch, and the contempt that she feels for one character plays out in the most gruesome of ways.
Newman has internalised the nobility of plucky heroes who fly in the face of bureaucracy, making Will the smartest guy in the room who everyone hates, and Chris the smartest woman on the planet who no one will listen to. Naturally, the only way to live is to do everything that they say, and the attrition rate will only increase with each cluck of the tongue and stroke of the beard from the city fathers. Everyone else gets a single characteristic, from old, to jerkwad, to can’t swim, to sad, to nurse.
To be fair, that is the full gamut of character types, and Newman’s pale outlines of a cast can’t overstay their welcome because they’re shuffled on and off the page with grave efficiency. This ties into Drowning’s greatest asset: its relative brevity. The events described take scarcely less time than it would take to read the novel itself, and without clunkers like “[they] were both acting on the greatest motivation in the entire human experience. They were parents fighting to save their child,” this could be a movie with the capacity for spectacle after a thorough mucking out.
Towards the end, Newman commits a fake out so transparent that it’s not clear that you’re supposed to fall for it, but the ultimate insult Drowning throws at the reader is an epilogue that is supremely wrongheaded and tips the novel’s balance into cruelty. If you had any doubt that Drowning was somehow a morality play, the epilogue is going to allay that. If you thought that any of the events were random, that’s foolish: we’re assured that it’s okay that certain characters died, that perhaps others even deserved their deaths. There’s a heavy degree of solipsism to this conclusion that ignores that Flight 1421 happened in a world that had people in it, and that not only the survivors or victims were affected. In its dying moments, Drowning presents a conclusion more claustrophobic than any rapidly flooding aircraft.
Is Drowning propulsively told or propulsively stupid? It’s a little bit of both, but the editorialising, the bare hints of libertarianism, and the boilerplate characterisation make it easy to read but hard to swallow. It’s the sort of book that you don’t regret reading but also don’t think it comes close to approaching good. With more research than storytelling and an offensively jejune family drama, Newman has fashioned an artless potboiler that briefly scratches an itch for aerial disaster then, inevitably, sinks beneath the waves.
