Recommend: No
Declan, being an engineer by trade, has broken down modern sci-fi into a surprisingly one-fits-all ratio: 70% world building around an interesting premise, 20% wandering exposition about said premise and 10% wrap up.
The Anomaly perfectly fits into his formula. And it is also an enormous amount of fun. I’ve never been particularly interested in France but French authors get such enjoyment out of their writing that I am finding them irresistible this year.
The Anomaly is a popular fiction romp in which an Air France flight, caught in an apocalyptic storm upon descending into New York, lands twice. Once on schedule in March 2021 and again, quite unexpectedly in June 2021. All the passengers also land twice, each one a carbon copy of their March 2021 counterparties.
The first third of the novel is the thrilling introduction to the March 2021 passengers. Le Tellier chooses a handful of Marchians and goes through them chapter by chapter. He gives us the backstory about why they were travelling from Paris to New York on that particular Air France flight and then flashes forward within the same chapter to see where these passengers are three months later when cagey FBI officers round them up. The middle third pulls the Marchian and Juneist passengers together as the US government tries to figure out what the hell to do with the doubles. Then the third and final act is broader and more societal in scope – society is formed over a long period of common challenges, so how does it function when confronted with something purely new and strange?
The Anomaly isn’t remotely interested in trying to answer this question and that is its downfall. This book delights so heavily in the set up that by the time it gets to the moral of the story it’s worn itself out. There is a second wind towards the end but it’s entirely spent on two plot twists.
The characters aren’t drawn with nuance, the pacing is imperfect (I could have done without the pop song excerpt) and there’s no overarching message. Yet it flies so much higher than comparable American popular fiction (see: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow). It is fun and deserves the title of ‘page turner’.
Would I recommend it as a must read? No.
Would I recommend it if you were looking for something weightless after work? Most definitely.
Just don’t read it on a plane. You’re in a bus thousands of meters up in the air. That’s unbelievable enough.
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