Flight [Hardcover]

In this, the age of the Euro, it seems appropriate that Victoria Glendinning has chosen to write a novel about Europe and about people whose lives are no longer bound by physical borders. The characters in Flight are new Europeans: wealthy professionals who think nothing of breakfast meetings in Paris, lunch in Cologne. But what effect has this opening up of nations had on these people's psyche, their cultural heritage? Have they lost some innate sense of belonging, or have they somehow morphed into citizens of the new world, comfortable in their cultural openness? Glendinning's characters jet across the continent desperately seeking answers to these and more fundamental questions of a secular existence: how to be a good person, live a decent life, pursue ethical business practices, love one's family and friends.

Martagon (his mother named him after a pink lily) is a highly respected engineer, known throughout the industry as a forward-thinking but deeply conscientious man. Having failed to get on an architecture course, he has spent his working life as an "artist engineer" justifying himself by pushing boundaries, working with the best, specialising in advanced use of glass. An only child whose father died young, Martagon has few friends and has never fallen in love. Until, quite unexpectedly, in the course of building a glass airport in the south of France, Marina enters his life. A minor French aristocrat, she is a vision of French elegance. Stunningly beautiful and clever too, Marina is proud of her cultural heritage and personal identity. Martagon is instantly captivated.

Inevitably, things soon start to go wrong. Martagon¹s desire for Marina affects not only other areas of his personal life, but, more importantly, his hitherto exemplary professional life. Glendinning builds her plot towards a shocking end, but ultimately, while questioning the basic human need to 'belong", and the overwhelming power and destruction of passionate love, Flight doesn't quite pull it off. --Carey Green

From one of the giants of modern English literature comes Flight, an irresistible novel about passionate love, morality, and flying too close to the sun.

This novel by Victoria Glendinning fixes on the idea of flight as escape, as a source of liberation from the mundane and the everyday. Level-headed engineer Martagon Foley is overseeing the creation of a flight of fancy in more ways than one: a stunning new airport for Provence, its floors and ceilings constructed completely from glass. In the process he falls head over heels for the beautiful Marina de Cabrieres, an exotic French aristocrat who is selling the family lands on which this new cathedral to commerce and travel will stand. But Marina is involved in a flight of her own - from an unhappy history and an outside world which has damaged and alienated her. The dream which the pair construct to provide their escape is potentially as brittle as the carefully engineered materials from which Martagon designs his transparent glass buildings. Can love persist in a world where freedom is compromised? Can the pair stay together, balanced in perfect equilibrium - or will one of them suddenly take off? Notions of transparency, secrecy and betrayal also infest the cut-throat business world in which Martagon must move. Private loyalties - to Marina, to his ailing mother, to his native Middle England and to his company's ageing chairman, the fatherly Arthur Cox - clash with his own fierce ambition, his creative urge to explore and grow. Will he abandon his scruples and fly, or allow his wings to be clipped in the interests of decency and compassion? Partly a love story, Flight also explores the increasingly global nature of our working lives, setting it against our basic need to belong, to make a home. How can we balance our need for personal happiness with our drive to achieve? How can we move on without leaving part of ourselves behind? (Kirkus UK)

Take a globetrotting English engineer; have him fall for a glamorous Frenchwoman; stir well; add a second woman and a dash of glitz. That's the recipe for this third fiction from Glendinning (Electricity, 1995, etc.), best known for her literary biographies. The engineer is the 38-year-old Martagon. It's an exciting time for the world (the cusp of the third millennium) and a welcome one for his cutting-edge engineering skills (glass is his specialty). He'd started out with a paternalistic firm and overseen its merger with a cutthroat competitor, inadvertently betraying his ex-employer but gaining a friend in Giles Harper, his new partner. A loner with no permanent girlfriend, Martagon finds an alternative family in the very married Giles and Amanda, along with Giles's "frail" sister Julie, who is raising her son alone after being abandoned by her Ethiopian husband. In time, Martagon parts from the overly aggressive Giles but works for him as a consultant on a glitzy high-tech airport in Provence, where he meets the dazzling redhead Marina, who is selling the family chateau for conversion into an airport hotel. For both, this is the Big One: no-holds-barred romantic love, expressed in language unfailingly banal. The two discuss living together, choosing to ignore the cultural differences between French and Anglo-Saxon that Diane Johnson has dissected so brilliantly in her novels. Meanwhile, in attending to Marina, Martagon has overlooked a flaw in the terminal roof, setting the project back five months. He returns to London, where he unaccountably yet repeatedly beds the frail Julie. Marina finds out. As he had after the airport debacle, Martagon reproaches himself for dishonorable behavior. ("Honor" and "balance" are concepts that Glendinning parades frequently, perhaps to give ballast to the fluff.) Marina forgives him, but then he loses her outright, because of his own poor scheduling. Time wounds all heels, they say, and Martagon does have a few bad moments, but little increase in self-knowledge. About par for this superficial man and superficial novel. (Kirkus Reviews)