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TRIANGULATION (Phoenix House. Hard Back 272 pages) by Phil Whitaker "Triangulation" is an account of a love triangle made up of two cartographers and a surveyor, all working for the Directorate of Overseas Surveys in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. The story is told by a method I call "selective release." The main character is advancing the plot in the present but this account is broken up by the author relating what has happened in the past. These pictures from the past gradually bring the reader to the point where he or she understands the reasons behind what is happening in the present. (I suspect authors use this method to create curiosity in a story that is too weak to stand an orthodox telling). However, I knew I must read this book when I read the following quotation that preceded the Prologue. TRIANGULATION A survey method in which an area is divided into triangles. In essence, the unknown distances between fixed points can be calculated from the observed angles. The mainstay of geodetic and topographical survey prior to the development of electronic distance measurement (EDM) and satellite global positioning systems (GPS), triangulation is now of historic interest only. Any analogy or comparison between the surveying triangle to the love triangle contained in "Triangulation" is not obvious. I presume the book gives an accurate picture of the Directorate of Overseas Surveys (DOS) at that time as the author's acknowledgments indicate he carried out some thorough research. He consulted Alastair Macdonald's history of the Directorate "Mapping the World." (The bar at DOS is know as "The Subtense Bar.") The main character is interviewed for a job as assistant map curator and one of the interviewers is a surveyor and "like many in his profession, thought everyone else should know exactly what surveyors did." For me the most interesting parts of the book were the long letters written by the surveyor while engaged on a triangulation survey - in, I suspect, Nigeria. A brief report on the trials of lights and helios on trig stations where the only communication is by these lights and helios is followed in a later letter by the coming of tellurometers I shan't pretend to understand every last thing about it, but essentially it sends out a beam of X-waves or micro-rays or some such nonsense, bouncing them back from a distant target. There's a fancy electronic calculation involved ... "Triangulation" also contains many observations on maps and mapping. A map is "a snapshot of the world as it was then." And on map scale: "the larger the ground area one wishes to represent, the less detail one is able to include." These, and similar statements, will be familiar to any who have worked with maps. However, a practising GP - like the author, Phil Whitaker - may consider these observations original. Whitaker is obviously a railway "buff." Many of the stations encountered on train journey to what may be the geographical centre of the British Isles are meticulously detailed. Whitaker is also "very English." He refers to his "Gray-Nicolls (cricket bat) and uses expressions like "nice chaps", "nasty" and "the less-fair sex." However, Whitaker's book is easy to read and while I was not greatly moved by the melancholy outcome of the love triangle, I was saddened by his account - incidental to the main story - of the demise of the Directorate of Overseas Survey into Ordnance Survey International Section in the face of "the new loathing of anything .....anything whose value couldn't be measured in purely economic terms." Works of fiction featuring surveyors and surveying are so rare that even one with as mediocre a storyline as the one in "Triangulation" is worth reading - worth reading by surveyors that is. R.J.Wenholz
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