- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Orion (6 May 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0575067217
- ISBN-13: 978-0575067219
- Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 13.5 x 2.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,950,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Book Description
Beautiful first novel in the tradition of Tim Pears and Tim Binding
Product Description
1957, a hot August bank holiday, an airshow in a northern English city: Blaise, a French stunt airman, prepares to leap from a Dakota on balsa-wood wings of his own construction. Among the thousands waiting below on the ground are the members of Cissie Conolly's troubled family. She has reached a crisis in her life: she wants to open a flower shop; her husband Joe has escaped into drink; her sister, Lydia, harbours deep suspicions about Cissie's instinctive understanding with Captain Jack, Lydia's elderly husband. Meanwhile Cissie's 7-year-old son, Graham, sulks in his back garden, left at home with the boozy, restless Joe, while Captain Jack, blind and dying, is allowed to go to the airshow with the boy's mother and aunt. Graham has not seen his mother for twenty years but in the early nineties he returns to the northern city to work as a hotel chef and he and his mother are brought to face, in their own ways, the enormous secret that has shaped their whole lives.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
First Novel Syndrome,
By A Customer
This review is from: Flight Patterns (Originals) (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.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Spectacular introduction that fizzles,
By A Customer
This review is from: Flight Patterns (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.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A superbly reconstructed narrative of time and family.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Flight Patterns (Originals) (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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