- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Phoenix; New edition edition (4 May 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0753810182
- ISBN-13: 978-0753810187
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 13 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 160,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Cissie has reached a crisis in her life - her husband has turned to drink and she has an understanding with her sister's husband. Her son Graham sulks in the garden, alone with his father. Years later, Graham returns to see his mother to come to terms with the secret that has shaped their lives.
From the Publisher
A brilliant debut by a writer who's paid his dues
As you can see from the cover if you click on it, Jim Crace has a high opinion of this novel: 'Alan Mahar's Flight Patterns is wonderful; he is a writer of substance, patience and real flair.' I share that opinion. It's a novel that carefully and unflashily gives you a real sense of the tensions that can affect a perfectly ordinary family as they go about their lives. It's not a 'family saga' that doggedly makes its way through decade after decade - it is set in the 1950s and 1990s, and the narrative jumps between the two decades, and in the process the author's deft touch give the reader a very real sense of the flavour of these two decades without overloading the period detail. It's a very 'English' novel, which makes no concessions to transatlantic style - an outstandingly satisfying read. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
As you can see from the cover if you click on it, Jim Crace has a high opinion of this novel: 'Alan Mahar's Flight Patterns is wonderful; he is a writer of substance, patience and real flair.' I share that opinion. It's a novel that carefully and unflashily gives you a real sense of the tensions that can affect a perfectly ordinary family as they go about their lives. It's not a 'family saga' that doggedly makes its way through decade after decade - it is set in the 1950s and 1990s, and the narrative jumps between the two decades, and in the process the author's deft touch give the reader a very real sense of the flavour of these two decades without overloading the period detail. It's a very 'English' novel, which makes no concessions to transatlantic style - an outstandingly satisfying read. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book suffers from First Novel Syndrome: an overload of coming-of-age angst (I suspect autobiographical) that all authors should get out of their system before going into print. The central event is interesting enough: the accidental splatting of a French 'birdman' at an air show (based on a real-life event that Clive Barker actually witnessed, and has described as shaping his career as a horror writer). But these are the only bones to a flabby padded narrative, that hops between Graham as a sulky child in a routine 1950s family and the same character, grown-up in the 1990s, as he potters around the depressing parts of Liverpool while introspecting about his past ... until he finally uncovers a not-very-surprising family secret. Who cares? Ultimately it left me wishing the birdman had fallen on Graham and killed the whole gloomy saga at birth.
Format:Paperback
This book has a promising opening: a boy, Graham, seeing the accidental splatting of a French 'birdman' at an air show (based on the real death of Leo Valentin in 1956, an event that Clive Barker witnessed, and has described as shaping his career as a horror writer). When you imagine what Barker might make of this source material, it's all the more depressing to read this flabby padded male-Angst story, that hops between young Graham sulking in his routine 1950s family and forty-something Graham pottering around run-down Liverpool while introspecting about his origins. The publisher's 1999 comments about Flight Patterns not "overloading the period detail" and making "no concessions to transatlantic style" sound like an excuse for its dull unspecific descriptions and its total lack of verbal vigour and narrative pace. Ultimately it left me wishing the birdman had fallen on Graham and killed the whole gloomy saga at birth.
Format:Paperback
Read this book for the superbly realised reconstruction of a point in time which has far-reaching consequences for a seven-year-old boy. That time is 1957 and that time and the events of that day radiate out from another time, the early nineties, when the seven-year-old boy, Graham, returns to his roots in a northern city where his mother, whom he hasn't seen for twenty years, still lives and who has a secret touching Graham's birth. Alan Mahar skilfully weaves city, history and family life into a seamless narrative.
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