The Falling Woman by Richard Farrell

Published by Algonquin Books on June 23, 2020

The Falling Woman tells a fascinating story. Erin Geraghty knows her death from pancreatic cancer is approaching. Against her husband’s wishes, she flies across the country to attend a retreat for cancer victims. Somewhere over Kansas, the plane on which she is flying explodes. Erin should fall to her death — a quicker death than the one she has been expecting — but she miraculously survives. And then, without contacting her husband or her two daughters, she disappears, leaving them to assume that she died in the crash.

Part of the story addresses how surviving the immediate threat of death, against all odds, alters Erin’s life, in part by vanquishing her fear of death. The bulk of the story, however, follows Charlie Radford, an aviation accident investigator, who is charged with investigating whether rumors of a crash survivor are real. Charlie is understandably skeptical. He is a rational man whose life is cabined by facts. His job is to ask the right questions and to let the facts carry him to a logical conclusion. Airline passengers who survive a six-mile fall are not part of a rational, fact-driven crash investigation. But the media will not let go of the story and families will not let go of the hope that a loved one might have survived. Charlie is therefore assigned to conduct what amounts to a missing persons investigation that he views as a fruitless distraction from the work he should be doing.

There is an element of the miraculous in Erin’s survival, but people have survived such falls. The story does not suggest that Erin was the recipient of divine intervention. Rather, it posits that she simply benefitted from a freakish but plausible set of circumstances that slowed the final stage of her fall. Erin is nevertheless left to wonder at the irony of knowing that each of the other passengers would likely have had a much longer reprieve from death if they had survived in her stead.

The story gains a sense of realism from its detailed depiction of a crash investigation and from the bureaucratic infighting of the crash investigators. Like all sizable offices, some employees compete to be recognized, some are driven by flashes of insight, and some succeed by plodding through the details. Charlie does not do well with office politics. Yet he’s always wanted to work a major investigation and this is his chance. Being detailed to chase down a rumor rather than performing useful and productive work is a nightmare that, he fears, will make him the agency laughingstock.

While the plot is compelling and fast moving, characterization is the novel’s strength. Charlie’s sense of self-worth comes from his work. He grew up wanting to fly but a heart defect killed that dream. His wife should understand that he is driven to be the best crash investigator he can be (he is the same person she married), but her maternal instincts are kicking into high gear, perhaps because she craves the constant attention that a baby, unlike Charlie, will provide. Charlie repeatedly puts off talking about the baby issue, creating a rift in their relationship and providing some of the novel’s tension.

In some ways, Charlie’s relationship with his wife parallels Erin’s relationship with her husband. Erin’s husband was, she admits, a reliable provider and a fine human being, but she regards him as stiff and incapable of satisfying her need for spontaneity. Having fallen from the plane and into a new life, she turns for help to a married man who once satisfied her needs, but he thinks she is cruel for wanting to hide instead of returning to her husband and daughters.

The reader might also judge Erin for being selfish. At times, she judges herself. Yet as Erin and Charlie have long and meaningful talks about their lives — talks they never had with their spouses — they each learn something about themselves, and the reader learns that it isn’t easy to judge someone without living their lives.

The novel’s central question and dramatic focus is whether Charlie will be loyal to his agency by revealing the circumstances of Erin’s survival, or will respect Erin’s desire to be left alone so that she can live the last few months of her life in peace. There are strong arguments to be made in favor of either decision and it is a tribute to Richard Farrell that the outcome is far from clear until it arrives. In that sense, The Falling Woman succeeds as a suspense novel. In a broader sense, it succeeds as an insightful character-driven novel of substantial literary merit.

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