Category Archives: Books

Asia, Books, History

Book Review: Atlantic Furies

LITERARY REVIEW

WHEN Ruth Elder arrived back in New York in 1927 after attempting to cross the Atlantic in her monoplane American Girl, the crowds were in awe.

The female aviator dubbed the “Flying Flapper” looked like a chic society woman with her Parisian suit, fox-fur coat, and bobbed hair.

It didn’t matter that American Girl was downed into the sea several hundred miles north of the Azores. As far as the media and newspapers were concerned, “Miss” Elder was a new kind of femme fatale.

In this compulsive book – part Barbie movie and part Wacky Races – social historian Midge Gillies tells the story of six women who competed to cross the Atlantic in the late 1920s.

Charles Lindbergh had been the first pilot to succeed non-stop solo in 1927, but now the race was on for the first “girl” flyer to complete the 3,000-mile arduous journey.

In an age of female emancipation, women were flying high.

Gillies’ half-dozen heroines hail from a wide background. There is peer’s daughter Hon. Elsie Mackay, African-American Bessie Coleman whose mother had been born into slavery, and Amelia Earhart who became the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic solo and non-stop.  

As for Ruth, she turned out to be on the run from a scandalous romantic past.

It was not all fun, games, or easy times; there were difficult or serious aspects involved. Four of Gillies’ Atlantic Furies failed to return from their expeditions, the most famous being Earhart who set off in 1937 in a bid to be the first woman aviator to circle the Equator.

Following several crackly radio messages received on July 2, her bright silver Lockhead Electra disappeared from the skies over the Central Pacific. It has yet to be found.

Gillies is adept in giving us a bone-shaking sense of what it must have been like to sit high in the skies, munching on chocolate for energy and in trying to screen out the propeller noise.

Flying through freezing fog involved terrifyingly low visibility, yet straining to get a better view could prove fatal.

In 1926 Coleman unhooked her safety belt to peer over the fuselage just as her plane dipped, with the result that she somersaulted to earth in front of horrified bystanders.

Not everyone believed that a woman’s place was in the skies. One doctor specialising in aviation medicine reported that having a period put a woman pilot at risk of crashing her plane. And then we read the dark comments of Major Oliver Stewart who wrote in the Tatler: “(Women) will be persuaded to mend their ways only when they have learned the truth that the lipstick is mightier than the joystick”.

Gillies makes short work of this historical misogyny, arguing that the courageous women who vied to cross the Atlantic were never going to put up with a man telling them what to do. (It is surely no coincidence that her heroines had 15 marriages between them.)

By the end of this thrilling book, it is impossible not to cheer for these magnificent women in their flying machines.

– Atlantic Furies by Midge Gillies is published by Scribe, 416pp

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Arts, Books, Environment, Literature

Climate fiction is extolling the real threats the planet faces

LITERATURE

Intro: A newly created award recognises the power of storytelling to address the biggest issues of our time

PAUL MURRAY, author of the bestselling novel The Bee Sting, told a media audience recently that no novelist should ignore the climate emergency: “It is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” In recognition of the essential and vital role of literature in responding to the Anthropocene moment, the inaugural shortlist has just been announced for the Climate Fiction prize.

The five novels include “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey, set during one day on the International Space Station (and the winner of last year’s Booker prize); time-travelling romcom “The Ministry of Time” from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller “Briefly Very Beautiful” by Roz Dineen; “And So I Roar”, about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht’s “The Morningside”. All the shortlisted authors are women.

Climate fiction is not new. Some of the landmark literary novels to have taken on the crisis include Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam dystopian trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, and Richard Power’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Overstory. Science fiction, inevitably, has become the genre of ecological catastrophe, with hits like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future”, with all the inhabitants of a small Indian town perishing in a heatwave.

The late Ursula K le Guin wrote that the task of sci-fi was “to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire”. The purpose of the realist novel is to reflect the world in which we live. For a long time, the possibilities of environmental breakdown were largely considered too wild and extreme for the realism. As a consequence, climate fiction hasn’t been taken seriously enough. In “The Great Derangement” in 2016, Amitav Gosh argued that the failure of so many novelists, including himself, to address the most urgent issue of the age was part of a broader cultural failure at the heart of the climate crisis itself.

Freakish and abnormal weather events are no longer the essence of speculative fiction – “global weirding” is upon us. What was once dubbed “cli-fi” is simply contemporary fiction. Ecological anxiety is as much a part of the fictional worlds of a young generation of novelists like Sally Rooney as the internet and mobile phones.

The novels on the Climate Fiction prize shortlist do not conform to dystopian stereotypes. Some aren’t even explicitly about the crisis. Some are hopeful. Far from being a portrait of a world ravaged by disasters, Orbital, for example, is a hymn to the awe-inspiring beauty of our planet.

It could be argued that having a Booker prize winner on the shortlist suggests there is no need for a specific award, which might marginalise climate fiction as a niche genre. There is no shortage of literary gongs. “The Wainwright prize”, set up in 2014 to celebrate the best nature books, now includes an award for writing on global conservation.

Yet awards amplify the message and reach of books that might otherwise be overlooked. Scientists have been cautioning about global warming’s dire consequences for decades. Governments and industry haven’t listened. Now novelists are taking up the challenge. Stories can create an impact far greater than data alone. They can inspire change. In a world where reality has become stranger than fiction, this new accolade is necessary and important. There can be no bigger story.

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Arts, Books, History

History Books of the Year

LITERARY REVIEWS

The Siege by Ben Macintyre (published by Viking, 400pp)

FOR six long days in the spring of 1980, the world held its breath after armed dissidents opposed to the Ayatollah Khomeini seized the Iranian embassy in London, holding 26 people hostage, among them a British policeman on duty at the door and two members of the BBC who were there to get visas.

It was a turning point, an event that broke entirely new ground. Not only was it the first time that Middle East terrorism reared its head in the West – an unwelcome chapter that is still far from finished – it was also the premier performance of Britian’s elite military soldiers, who took the embassy, gun-toting figures in black balaclavas storming it on live, prime-time television.

Most of the public had never heard of these Special Forces or Regiment before; afterwards, they were – and still are – a legend.

Ben Macintyre tells the inside story with his customary pace and panache, the tension mounting as the minutes ticked away and the terrorists threatened to murder their hostages, but also not shying away from the moral nuances of the finale in which all but one of the perpetrators died.

Macintyre’s account draws on contemporary diaries and interviews with witnesses. The Ministry of Defence cleared former special forces soldiers to speak to him. He writes: “Most of the source material is secret, pseudonymous, or privately owned.” With some justification, this has been described as “the last word on the subject”.

Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers by Anne Somerset (Published by William Collins, 576pp)

A MONARCH reigns but does not rule – that is the unique and eccentric nature of the British constitution.

And the restrictions placed on her ability to get her own way frequently enraged Queen Victoria.

In public, her prime ministers queued up to praise her “thorough understanding” (Gladstone’s phrase) of her constitutional position, but they, of all people, knew first hand how indignant she became on being reminded of who really ran the country.

Theoretically, she had immense power – to disband the army, declare war, pardon all convicted offenders, and to dismiss the civil service. Wisely, she chose not to risk a revolution by exercising these rights, but that didn’t mean she was politically inactive. Behind the scenes, she made her presence, her views and, above all, her displeasure known to the various men – ten in all over 64 years – who headed her governments.

Her meddling led to Gladstone to whisper behind her back that she was “an imperious despot”.

The feeling was mutual. She couldn’t stand him and complained he was humourless, and unable to take a joke.

But according to Anne Somerset, Queen Victoria made an important impact through her “uncanny ability to align herself with public opinion, instinctively espousing views that coincided with those of many of her subjects”, even though her day-to-day life in palaces and country houses was far removed from theirs.

The common sense of the stout little widow in a black bonnet – drawing on what she called her “desire to do what is fit and right” – was crucial in steering the nation away from the sort of popular unrest and extremism that after her death would overtake other European countries.

Takeover: Hitler’s Rise to Power by Timothy W. Ryback (Published by Headline, 416pp)

At the back end of 1932, it was common currency among the politically aware in the Weimar Republic that the man they sneered at as the “Bavarian corporal” was a busted flush, along with his Nazi Party and its uniformed stormtroopers.

They’d failed to get anywhere near a majority in recent elections to the Reichstag, with two-thirds of German voters rejecting them and their share of the popular vote falling.

A cartoon on the front page of a national newspaper had Adolf Hitler slouching against a table holding a broken swastika in his hand like a child moping over a broken toy.

And just weeks later, at the end of January 1933, that same Adolf Hitler was all-powerful, reluctantly appointed Chancellor of Germany by the ageing President von Hindenburg.

Twice in the past, Hindenburg had sent Hitler away empty-handed, refusing to elevate the would-be dictator. This time, caught in a constitutional deadlock of rival parties, none of whom had majority backing, he gave in submissively. 

How Hitler combined foot-stamping intransigence with adept political manoeuvring (i.e. lies and broken promises) to reach his objective is forensically examined by US historian Timothy Ryback. What comes across is how close the Führer came to failing and possibly sparing the world all the horrors that followed.

Instead, the complacency of his multiple enemies, pursuing their own interests instead of combining to keep him out, gave Hitler his opportunity.

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