It's World Book Day, so here's an oldie on one of our fav books - Mark Vanhoenacker's luminous Skyfaring
When Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was first asked to fly the mail from Alicante to Casablanca, he asked another pilot, Guillaumet, to talk him through the terrain in advance. This was 1926 and aviation was a somewhat magical business."Guillaumet didn't teach me about Spain," Saint-Exupéry later wrote,"he made Spain my friend. He didn't talk about hydrography, or population figures, or livestock.
I re-read this passage recently and thought: that's lovely writing, and I love the clipped, aristocratic certainty of it, but is he correct? Flight may have moved beyond the days that Saint-Exupéry is so brilliant at describing, when a navigator would often stick his head out of the window when flying - I forget what they would be checking; I'm sure they had their reasons - but flight is still a thing of fairytales and wonder.
Like Flight Sim, Skyfaring gives you the world. Vanhoenacker travels back and forth across the globe and every time I read his book I want to get out more. A night landing in Los Angeles, the most beautiful of cities and the most beautiful of city approaches. A trek in Africa. A straight line from London to Tokyo - you take off and just point the nose to Japan! Vanhoenacker talks of Place-Lag, a geographical condition that comes from moving so far and so swiftly that the mind struggles.
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