#BlogTour ‘Falling’ by T.J Newman

Cruising in a tidal wave of hype, when you pick apart the pieces of this story it is, essentially, about the frailty of human life, contrasted with archetypal human failings of greed, ruthlessness and disregard for others.

And that, my friends -along with the tagline of ‘Jaws at 35,000 feet’, ‘Jaws being one of my favourite novels-is why I was caught, hook line and sinker.

Pilot, Bill Hoffman, leaves his home under a cloud, an argument with his wife over his prioritising of his job over his son’s Little League debut souring the atmosphere. He has been called in as a last minute emergency pilot by his boss, and, having been in the company since its inception, his loyalties are torn.

The scene set- all American man, heteronormative family, stable home-it comes smashing down as a gunman, posing as a cable guy, enters Bill’s house and holds his family hostage. The price? His family or the 149 souls on board the flight.

Bill is kind of like Chief Brody, constantly having to balance his need to provide for the family in a way that maintains their life style whilst the family resents his absence from the house he built.

Capitalism versus personal rights and obligations are an age old dilemma, but when you place that in a metal tin, flying high in the air without a safety net, how do you begin to unravel this and not lose lives?

The sequence at the beginning, a shocking act which lingers over the whole book, is unclear whether it is a foreshadowing of disaster or post disaster PTSD is for the reader to consider. There is little connection between the reader and the characters apart from the named Bill, which immediately places his at the forefront of your mind.

What follows is a race against time, reminiscent, to this ancient reader, of Arthur Hailey’s ‘Airport’, a breathless quest to convey to those on the ground that Carrie, her and Bill’s children Emily and Scott have been tied up with explosives attached to them. It has all the elements required of a massive summer blockbuster-people who have never really worked before having to come together under pressure, trying to work out what the motivation behind the hijack is, and all the passengers on board with their individual back stories. T.J Newman resists the temptation to paint too broad a canvas whilst simultaneously getting the reader to connect to the sense of peril that those on the plane are under.

For someone who has never been on a plane, it felt absolutely authentic with details only someone who had regularly flown could include lending a smoothness to the reading that won’t exclude the grounded reader. This will be snatched up in the thousands at airports and I would love to know if the author is secretly thrilled that her dramatic plot will be stripping people’s finger nails and leaving dents in the arm rests of planes around the world.