REVIEW: The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

Fiction. 400 pgs. Other Press. November 2021. 9781635421699.

One storm. Two planes. Two captains. Two sets of passengers. You see where I’m going with this. Or maybe you don’t.

The Anomaly is a speculative novel about reality, the limitations of our own comprehension, and what it means to be our “self.” It follows a cast of characters, all passengers aboard Air France 006 from Paris to New York.

The flight runs into life-threatening turbulence, the plane takes a nosedive, and eventually finds its way back to safety. It’s an exciting event, one that leaves an impact on each of our protagonists, but isn’t until we’re nearly two hundred pages in that we understand the larger plot at work.

Depending on your appetite for shifts in perspective, the narrative might be thrilling, perplexing, or difficult to anchor yourself in. Not only do we switch between different characters, but we zoom in and out from close, introspective third to a wide-scoped omnipresent narrator in a matter of sentences.

From a hitman assassin and a flailing writer to an ambitious legal mind and an aspiring actress, our characters have little in common, other than the flight they shared and their “real” selves that they choose to keep under wraps.

That is, until they are confronted with their doubles.

The nature of reality, of our existence, is perpetually up to date. We don’t need “acts of God” or  mathematical anomalies to incite our own existential dread, but they are extremely helpful at forcing us to confront that question: Are we real? And, does it matter one way or another?

Hervé Le Tellier has a clear vision for how this would all play out. The story unfolds almost effortlessly, as if set in motion by a programmer, and when we reach the end, it all feels like we’ve landed on a natural target. That in itself isn’t all that enlightening, but when you contrast it with the talks of simulations, of how we as fiction writers are setting this plots in motion, it can start to trip you up in the best kind of way.

Who is the higher power responsible for this anomaly? Could it be a far more advanced version of ourselves? Is it worth even thinking about?

There are bits and pieces of the story that took me out as a reader. The pop culture references aren’t poison pills, but they felt lazy. The unnamed American president who is clearly Donald Trump felt too timely. Though, his anonymity, when the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Stephen Colbert get name dropped, is a nice little dig.

At times, the narrative can feel a bit pretentious. Others, too commercial. Maybe there’s a point to that, or maybe it’s the work of an insightful editor. Could be a matter of something getting lost in translation.

When we reach the end, there’s a compulsion to analyze, interpret, and even decode. It’s dangerous, in that a slip into nihilism, provoked by an understanding that life is meaningless, can lead us into chaos. It’s what the American president seems to understand, almost ironically, more than those around him.

We will rationalize the irrational until our dying breath.