I remember hearing about the
miraculous survival of a stowaway in an aircraft’s landing gear. This was a few
years ago, but the episode stuck with me and I’ve wondered from time to time at
the level of desperation someone must feel to take such a risk. Author Kate
Pullinger was similarly affected by the story—or one like it. As it turns out,
an internet search for the event turns up a number of such episodes, some
ending tragically, others not.
Landing Gear is a tale of
risks taken and lives changed. For Yacub, Pullinger’s stowaway, the risks and
changes are existential; for the other characters they are more quotidian, even
if not exactly calculated or harmless.
Harriet and Michael and their
teen-aged son Jack live in London in a respectable, quiet neighbourhood. When
the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, erupts in 2010, shutting down airspace
over a large part of Europe, their lives change. Or, to put it more accurately,
they change their lives. Michael can’t get home from a business trip to New
York; Harriet sees this as a chance to advance her career on radio and parlay
that into television broadcasting; Jack, left to his own devices, starts to
hang out with friends and their older siblings. Each of these main characters
make decisions in a heady atmosphere inspired by a suddenly silent, blue sky.
Landing Gear is also
about secrets, more specifically, secrets in a time of burgeoning public
information. Harriett alludes to some “event” that happened in her past, one
that her quiet, rather uncommunicative husband has not pushed her to reveal.
Neither does she express her insecurity about her work, which she views as
unequal to her abilities, although it’s the most she seems able to muster since
Jack was born and she “missed her chance” for advancement. Michael is solid,
becoming more so all the time it seems, since the collection of jeans that he
buys in New York and stores on a closet shelf in London, are piled in order
from oldest to newest and correspondingly from smallest to largest. He decides
to wait out the airspace shut down in Toronto, where he can visit Maria, a
romantic interest from half a lifetime ago. Though they rarely communicate he
views her as an old friend. Since he grew up in Canada, Michael is drawn there
as a comfortable place in a strange time. When, after a week of living
together, he has sex with Maria again he has to decide what he will do next. Jack, meanwhile, at home with much more time to himself, begins to
experiment with drugs and ends up at a party where one of his school mates
dies.
There is a lot about Landing Gear that seems improbable, but
then who would believe someone could survive a flight from Karachi to London
tucked away under the wheels of the landing gear of a jet? And who would believe
most of European air space would be shut down because of an Icelandic volcano?
That’s part of what is so compelling about Pullinger’s writing: there is enough
that we’ve lived through to make her other episodes believable against
significant odds.
As we can come to expect in
literature as in life, social media plays a significant role in this story of a
family going about their daily activities and then trying to make new
arrangements when something out of the ordinary happens to them. In fact, Facebook
is almost a character in itself. Harriet calls herself “Crazeeharee” attempting
to fit in so she can watch what Jack is doing—and so she can learn about Emily,
another young person connected to her mysterious past. She also uses Facebook
to find and meet with someone she would have been better off to have let
disappear from her life. She not only watches; she is watched. Emily stalks
Harriet for two years, furtively taking photos and video of her, and manages to
capture and post—with its own consequences—an image of Yacub falling from the
sky. Facebook also reveals other aspects of the characters’ lives and often
helps keep the action going. And there is lots of action. For example,
Harriet’s risky meeting has results so explosive as to be humorous – for the
reader; and Yacub’s life in Dubai is fraught with action of its own kind.
But for all its social media
content and consequences, Landing Gear
is no distopia along the lines of The
Circle by Dave Eggers. It’s a
thoroughly pleasant read about an interesting and, for the most part, pleasant
world, one that wouldn’t spoil a summer laze on the dock or seaside. Neither is
it a trifle. The main characters are richly drawn and while they are pleasant
and even admirable on occasion, neither are they stereotypical. They grapple
with finding meaning in their lives and articulate complex issues for
themselves. In other words, they lead examined lives.
The motif of falling gives
Pullinger an opportunity to explore various kinds of landing gear. Michael, the
steady provider, feels he is falling out of his marriage and out of his life,
and is anxious to get back to work where at least, he thinks, “risk is
theoretically quantifiable.” Yacub falls out of the sky and into a fairy tale
situation, hidden away in Harriet’s back room until he is discovered by the
rest of the family who then swing into action, providing him with everything he
needs. The mystery of the story also ends up involving a great fall. And
Harriet’s daily trips to the supermarket are a response to what she sees as her
fall from grace after the explosive event she precipitated with a risky
Facebook connection.
Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing received the Governor General’s Literary Award for
Fiction and Landing Gear will be her tenth novel. Her prose moves along at a
lively pace and her non-linear structure hints at various mysteries that by the
end are satisfying solved. Interestingly, Pullinger’s website indicates that she is going to
launch an “API version” of the book — API standing for application programming
interface, a digital experiment that allows readers to write back into the
story, co-creating a new text. As Pullinger said not long before the book went
to press, “So while the book itself - the typeset version - is nearly finished,
our digital experiment with Landing Gear
is only just beginning.”
It seems we can add Pullinger
to the list of risk-takers in Landing
Gear.
Reginald
Sauvages, PhD, is the nom de plume of a local bibliophile (read: bookworm) who
goes on building bookshelves and buying paperbacks for the beach so sand
doesn’t ruin favourite clothbound books, even while owning an e-reader.
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