The anti-Biggles takes to the sky
Fighter-pilot novels are back on the radar says Antonia Senior
MacLeHose Press 224pp. £8.99
; e-book £8.99
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Bad battles are as ubiquitous in fiction as bad sex.
Swashes buckle and cannon fire; young men die in ever more brutal detail. As our
squeamishness about actual fighting has increased, so our appetite for reading
about it, drenched in modernistic gore, is unabated.
Amid the
tide of war porn on the shelves, it is a rare experience to come across an
author who can write about war and leave the reader seared and gasping. Derek
Robinson’s series of novels about fighter pilots in the 20th century has
attracted glowing reviews and a hard core of fans. But his pilots live beneath
the radar of the general reading public. This may be about to change.
PLANE TRUTHS Derek Robinson’s novels are rooted in
realism.
Christopher
MacLehose, the publisher and founder of MacLehose Press, part of Quercus, has long been a fan of Robinson’s a dark
humour. For the first time all his flying tales will be available, published by
his imprint. Inthe year that America has discovered its own overlooked
septuagenarian, the short-story writer Edith Pearlman, it is time to celebrate our
own under-rated octogenarian.
No one
writes about war quite like Robinson, despite attempts to shroud him in echoes of
other writers, such as Joseph Heller or Norman Mailer. He writes with a bleak
savagery, in controlled, precise prose. There is humour – and it is dark and
painful. There is love – and it is inadequate and messy. Most of all there is
death. It comes from clear blue skies and grey clouds, from enemy fire and
friendly mistakes. It hovers, unseen, at
15,000 feet.
Goshawk Squadron, which came close to winning the Booker Prize in
1971, is still as raw and shocking to read it must have been on publication,
when the mythology of the nobility of aerial warfare still resonated. Set among
the pilots of the First World War, it split the Royal Flying Corps veterans
into bitter camps – those who resented the book’s darkness and those who revelled
in its realism.
The young pilots are
arrogant and violent. There is a surfeit
of courage, little nobility
Stanley Wolley,
the squadron leader, is the anti-Biggles: cynical and cold. Robinson’s young
pilots are arrogant, and casually violent. There is a surfeit of courage but little nobility.
Goshawk Squadron was the first of three novels about the Royal Flying
Corps and joined a rich tradition of literature about the air. Piece of Cake, the first of three novels
about the Royal Air Force, was filmed as a TV series in 1988 by LWT. Despite
early success and critical approbation, by 2008 Robinson’s star had waned so
far that he could not find a publisher for his novel, Hullo Russia, Goodbye England. He was forced to self-publish. Set
in Cold War Britain, it tells the story of Flight Lieutenant Silk, a Second
World War veteran who pilots the Vulcan aircraft designed to drop a retaliatory
nuclear bomb on Russia. The pilots are briefed about getting to Moscow; on the
return leg, there is silence.
Silk is
no introspective Hero. He's awkward and irascible. He tries to ignore this
question: if England has been destroyed, what is the point of the second
strike? Why should the pilot, with no home left and no chain of command to
worry about, actually press the button?
After 40
years honing his craft, Robinson is still writing. He is frequently compared to
Joseph Heller as their books share a sense of the absurdity of war. But whereas
Catch-22 is rife with authorial
trickery, all the black humour in Robinson’s books is rooted in realism.
The bogus
comparison may have served to dampen Robinson's status among literary theorists,
for whom Heller’s inventiveness trumps his rivals clipped prose. But only one of
them can make the brutalised, scarred
reader put down the book with relief and
think: “Yes. This is how it was.”
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