The Aviator by Ernest K. Gann

 

Now the pilot glanced down at the terrain and knew again a momentary sense of foreboding. Unless the weather was very fine it was always the same through here. The mountain plateau was high and devoid of human trespass. Here the surface of the earth seemed to be made of roughly cast iron. Bold and barren escarpments served the pilots who flew this way as recognizable markers in a rumpled ocean of rock and desert. It was wild country and there had been times when the pilot wondered if it were possible to fear land itself.

Lest one think that a novel that centers around aviation does not belong in the Western genre, allow me to plead its case.

The novel is set in 1928, thusly the early unregulated wild and wooly years of flying. The days of “do it yourself” repairs and often self-taught fliers taking chances in a brand-new frontier.

Here’s historian Paul O’Neil on these early days.

“The men and women who flew the Jennies and later the Gee Bees, the Super Solution and the Wedell-Williams racers were direct descendants and, in many ways, the final heirs of the footloose frontiersmen of an earlier century who had crossed the Appalachians and wandered the West; they risked their lives as a matter of course because that was the only way to reach the next mountain range—or to achieve the next aerial stunt—and the prize still seems worth the gamble.”

Or, consider this, the early airmail fliers [“Flying the mails” as in this novel] were required to carry a side-arm, a holdover from the Pony Express days.

Or, consider this, Western filmmaking legend John Ford saw these early fliers as “cowboys of the sky” we see it in later work but none more tellingly than his own 1932 Air Mail which features some spectacular stunt flying by Paul Mantz.

Viewing this film one can easily feel the precursor of the rough and rowdy camaraderie that pops up in Ford’s cavalry pictures.

John Wayne himself made a few flying pictures, most notably, 1953’s Island in the Sky an adaptation of a novel by the very author we are examining today.

To the book itself, at last.

Is it good?

Indeed, this brief novel [148 pages] packs the heart of middle-period L ’Amour and has that same resonance with the land itself.

Upon its release it was described by some critics as a “True Grit of the air.” There is a young girl in it, but the comparisons beyond that does little justice to either novel—both are exceptional and have their own merits.

Spoiler-free: Here we have a disfigured air mail pilot who reluctantly takes a young girl as a passenger on a dangerous run.

What follows has heart, resonance, depth, perhaps a bit square around the edges but the authenticity smooths that squareness with its humanity.

A fine novel.