Tag Archives: books

Read and watched in 2010

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For personal record only. Further analysis may or may not happen.

Read:

Watched:

Empire of the Clouds

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One of the joys of my particular childhood was that where some kids get dragged out to the park or the common on a Sunday afternoon, we got drug to the SAS training ground at Pontrilas, just down the road from Hereford. I could scavenge the derelict buildings for the plasticine left over from the boys’ plastic explosive training; sometimes I might even get to shoot a gun; and there were a Vampire jet fighter and a Canberra bomber, both there for the boys to practice blowing up. They obviously weren’t very good at it, or else just shouted “BANG!” at the right moment because either way the planes were resolutely still there every time we visited. The Canberra was either sealed up or else the entrance was just too high up for a small boy to get into, but the Vampire was easily accessible so at a moment’s notice I could become Scott Tracy or a fearless starfighter pilot or whatever I wanted.

(This was also probably where I learnt the word “Vampire”. Also probably the word “Canberra”, but that one hasn’t really entered the mythology in the same way.)

All brought back to mind by reading the wonderful Empire of the Clouds by James Hamilton-Paterson: an unashamedly boy-geek book about Britain’s post-war aircraft industry, and why for a while we were producing the best (or at least most promising) aircraft in the world, and how it came to pass that nowadays we singularly don’t. It was a different age. A plane could disintegrate at the Farnborough airshow, killing both pilots and 27 spectators, and the programme would carry on with the pilot of the next plane up simply being advised to keep to the right to avoid the wreckage on the runway. The test pilots of the Comet knew when they had hit a certain speed because the external skin flexed with a particular banging sound – only later did it occur to them that this might mean the construction was quite flimsy. The mustn’t grumble/austerity way of life that had been perfected during WW2 carried on into peacetime and meant people could get away with risks and lifestyles that nowadays would get the entire fleet grounded. Unfortunately this attitude cut both ways, with the recommendations or outright pleas of experienced pilots being overruled by arrogant and complacent management who just expected them to get on with their job. The chief test pilot of Gloster, a decorated war hero and ipso facto one of the most important jet pilots in the world, was on a salary of £1500 – which translates to about £20k today.
And the politicians really didn’t help. For not very long in the fifties, but for just long enough to be truly suicidal, official policy was that the days of the fighter were over and from now on it was all guided missiles. The Fairey Delta, a truly world-beating fighter craft, was commissioned by the UK government, but new rules about supersonic overflight of populated areas meant it couldn’t be tested in the UK. Also, the government refused to pay for damage caused by sonic bangs and no UK insurance company would touch the matter. So, the head of Dassault invited the Brits over to France to test the plane there, and also put them in touch with a French insurance company that would cover the entire test for £40. The Fairey Delta was to fall by the wayside while Dassault was to produce the highly successful Mirage – which looked astonishingly similar, but to be fair that’s probably convergent evolution at work.
To be even fairer the author tries to show both sides of the coin. The cancellation of the TSR.2 was something that still causes people of a certain generation to spit out bits of ground glass, and was part of a Night of the Long Knives defence cut by Denis Healey that closed down four projects and ultimately left the RAF having to borrow fighters off the navy. And yet, the book does give the other picture – the reasons why the projects had to be shut down, which might have been inevitable but not necessarily with the same crass insensitivity.
History repeats itself in so many ways …
I think much of what the book describes was inevitable. The WW2 culture of dozens of companies turning out dozens of designs was never going to last long – too expensive, too inefficient. As planes get faster and faster, face it, they do all start to look astonishingly similar, so the wonderfully varied Thunderbirds-type future of my childhood dreams was doomed from a very early age. This book is still required reading for what was, what might have been, and what wasn’t.

Wouldn’t have made much difference if they did

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Every now and then I read a book that makes me wonder why I don’t just give up trying to write the things myself, because I’ll never get that much under the reader’s skin or into their minds.

The latest is We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

One April in 1999, shortly before Columbine (whose participants he regards as pathetically amateur, juvenile attention seeking losers), 15-year-old Kevin Khatchadourian joins the woefully long list of teenage perpetrators of high school massacres, taking out seven fellow students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker (who wasn’t meant to be there in there) in the school gym. On that day, one way or another, his mother Eva loses everything – husband, daughter, company, house, livelihood; in fact, the one thing she doesn’t lose is … Kevin himself.

The novel takes the form of a series of letters from Eva to her husband, chronicling their life together before and after Kevin’s birth and the nearly 16 years since. It’s a therapeutic exercise for her as she rhetorically asks all the inevitable questions, not really expecting an answer. Was it my fault? Was it ours? Did I/do I love him? Could we have done anything different? This itself makes the book an interesting exercise in reading between the lines. We’re getting Eva’s point of view, she’s writing with hindsight anyway, and in between all the clues and pointers towards what we know is coming, there must have been a lot of time in their day to day lives when life was relatively normal. Was Kevin really that bad? Was her husband really so blind? But even though we know what’s coming, it never gets boring. There is still room for revelation and “oh, I see …” moments, and when the massacre finally happens it’s almost – in a very guilty way – possible to admire it. There is nothing random about this; Kevin knows exactly what he’s doing, and by the end of the book, Eva and we know exactly why he did it. We have no excuses, because there are none; but we do have reasons and they make sense.

There’s still room for humour, albeit very black; like, the simple description of Kevin’s unsuccessful year in a Montessori nursery school, which is predicated on the basis that everyone is innately good and capable of self-improvement. Maybe it was coincidence that all their plants started dying at the same as Eva absently notes the absence of a bottle of bleach she could have sworn was there. The obnoxious school bully that everyone lived in fear of might have had a very good, non-Kevin-related reason for locking himself in a closet and refusing to come out like that. And so on.

One of the few things Eva and Kevin can agree on is their disdain for a world where everything must be someone’s fault, and when something goes wrong you find someone to blame and sue ’em. Where they differ is in how they tackle the problem … It sounds very posy to start quoting William Blake at this point, because believe it or not I don’t have the complete works of Blake committed to memory, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice, but is just so happens that Bonusbarn is studying “Auguries of innocence” and we were discussing it while I read the book. And so it reminded me:

“Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.”

In their own ways, neither Kevin nor Eva rightly knew it.

My one fault with the book isn’t the author’s fault: it’s that the kid on the cover is blond whereas we are oft reminded that Kevin has dark features inherited from his Armenian mother. However, I see there’s going to be a film of it and he will be played by one Ezra Miller, who I’ve never heard of (hey, he’s a kid) but who looks perfect. Meanwhile Eva will be Tilda Swinton, who excels at vulnerable ice queens, and Kevin’s dad is John C. Reilly, who was the lovable chump of a husband in Chicago. It’s almost a bit too perfectly cast, but I still look forward to it.

Probably watching it on my own, though …