1936 semi-autobiographical novel. Robert Owen, out of the Royal Air
Force, goes to work as an instructor at a small flying club in an
English cathedral town.
So on one level this is life in the flying club as reported by
someone who may have been there (verifiable biographical details about
Rhys' life are very limited but not incompatible). As an instructor,
Owen is at the interface between on one side the "real" professional
pilots, his fellow instructors, and on the other the club members,
some few of whom are going for commercial licences, but many of whom
aren't serious fliers at all, just hanging on around the edges. (And
of course that's just one of the ways in which "Flying clubs are the
most snobby places in England"; everyone who has any money is
self-made, but some of them are better at hiding it than others, and
Owen is definitely an employee.)
There's a lot of drinking, and a lot of horrible grasping brassy women
(I'll be polite and assume this is Owen's evaluation of them rather
than Rhys'). There's a lot of death, rather more I suspect than a
single flying club could have withstood, though the routine use of
fields as landing sites is certainly reasonable for the time. And
there's the constant pressure from the committee to keep taking money
from students rather than tell them that they're too dangerous to be
allowed to fly or allow them to be frightened off.
There's one member in particular known as the "Ground Instructor"
because he always steps in with a plausible-sounding answer to any
question even though he's both bad and inexperienced as an actual
pilot. In many books that would be the beginning and end of his
character, but Rhys manages to work in a little more interest as Owen
gets to know him.
There's also some technical detail of flying in the Gipsy and Tiger
Moth era, when instrument flying just meant keeping the attitude
indicators centred and following the compass, and training for it
involved having a hood over the cockpit. But mostly this is a story of
personalities, and particularly of teaching: of how Owen melds the
pupil's actions, his own feelings about them, and various external
pressures to come up with a reaction when they've just got something
wrong—or right.
And there's a doomed love affair (I don't think that's a spoiler; it's
that sort of book) with a female student who's married to a horrible
old rich man. For me this element was the weakest, though Rhys does
his best to bring to Owen's amatory desires the same heart-song that
accompanies his flying.
As I fly, he thought, my speed robs the world of motion; the noise
of engine, airscrew, wind in the wires, absorbs its many sounds. As
I journey eastwards my mind, in common with all airmen, soars above
the world. As I journey with the wind for a cloak and the clouds far
beneath my feet, I rise above the frustration that is life, above
strife and jealousy and hatred; above money, above ambition, above
desire. And even the steam of a train, creeping into the still
countryside as ink soaking into blotting-paper, cannot convince me
of the enveloping futility of mundane existence. Even the knowledge
that men have twisted flying itself into an instrument of murder
cannot deny me a state, politic and continent, cannot prevent me
finding a great stillness of spirit in this lofty contemplation of
the trivialities of my understanding.
Not "fun" exactly but definitely thought-provoking, and thoroughly
worth reading if one's interested in the period. Recommended by Brett
Holman.