Agreeable everydayness adds to appeal
The Sun’s book club is discussing Landing Gear by Kate Pullinger (Random House). Landing Gear is a novel about modern life, focusing on a would-be immigrant from Pakistan who stows away in an airplane’s landing gear, jumping out just outside London and landing in a British family’s life. We will be chatting online with Pullinger at noon on Oct. 16. Plan to join the conversation at vancouversun. com/books. Pullinger is appearing in two events at the Vancouver Writers Fest. writersfest.bc.ca. We’re giving away two tickets to the event, A Community of Characters with Kate Pullinger, Cristina Henriquez and Maylis de Kerangal on Oct. 22 at 6 p.m., thanks to the Writers Fest. The winner of the tickets will be chosen from readers who tweet or email a 140-character summary of Landing Gear, including the hashtag #vansunbooks. Email to tsherlock@vancouversun.com.
Monique Sherrett: As for the everydayness in Landing Gear, I keep coming back to the opening sequence. It’s so ordinary. Here’s a woman, at a grocery store, it’s the bane of her existence, the constant shop to fill the fridge. And then a man falls out of the sky and lands on her car. We have all the banalities of Facebook, Twitter, videos games, reality TV, YouTube, tumblr and the news cycle. All the little things that tick away like a metronome of our modern, connected life. Stuff you don’t even notice, like the sounds of planes flying overhead, that is until they stop.
It’s Easter in London. The volcanic ash cloud has downed planes all across Europe and it forces people to pause. Each of the characters is altered by this break in the routine, but they basically are just letting life happen to them. Jack is pulled along with his friends. He has a great moment outside of himself where he realizes he’s acting like a teen in all the ways that he’d cringe about, but he’s compelled to act up anyway. Harriet has her career that’s stalled at local radio. The grocery shopping is her Sisyphean task. Michael is an expat living in London, but not really living. He goes to work, he comes home. Emily is caught in the outline of some reality TV program of her own making. And Yacub, well maybe there’s hope in Yacub.
Melanie Jackson: Great points, Monique. I guess I will focus on how Pullinger’s writing style contributes to the very agreeable everydayness of the novel. She recounts the various calamitous events with such breeziness; many other writers wouldn’t. Body crashes into car! Husband betrays wife! In someone else’s hands, there would be headache-inducing hyperbole and maudlin dialogue. In the world of Landing Gear, life may be trying at times, but it continues flowing along. You feel bemused by the events as well as gripped by them; fond of the main characters as much as sorry, angry, pitying, relieved, etc., on their behalf. Even in the tightest spots, Pullinger never lets her characters or the reader down. Her everyday world is actually quite a magical one.
Julia Denholm: I agree with Melanie, and cannot help adding that the matter-of-factness is practically Kafka-esque. One day Harriet goes off to the store only to have a man fall from the sky and land on her car. It’s been a long time since I read The Metamorphosis, but doesn’t Gregor’s family sort of ignore the fact that he has turned into a giant bug? Harriet seems to have no problem ignoring that Yacub has (impossibly) survived his fall from the wheel well. I guess I also find it sadly ordinary that Michael has an affair while trapped in the colonies. What else does one do when confronted with a great deal of time, no airline travel, and an old lover in proximity? Which is not to say that I didn’t find those events compelling — the inevitability of Michael’s betrayal is part of what makes him so interesting. If that makes any sense at all.
Ian Weir: I’m intrigued by Julia’s reference to The Metamorphosis. There really is something Kafka-esque in the way cataclysmic events are deliberately understated, with characters trying desperately to carry on as if nothing out-of-the-ordinary has happened. I love the notion of Yacub as a variation on Kafka’s giant bug — although I also found myself thinking of a very different literary antecedent. Amid the haunting everydayness of Landing Gear, Yacub calls to mind the bedraggled angel who plummets to earth at the beginning of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. He’s the flickering possibility of transcendence, a last frail hope that redemption might still be possible. And damned if he doesn’t “fly” one more time — at least in Jack’s drug-addled perception of events — in Jack’s moment of greatest need at Dukes Meadows.
Julia Denholm: Ah — and like the angel in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s brilliant short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” who also plummets out of the sky and is promptly relegated to a chicken coop.
Our book club panel includes Ian Weir, author of the novel Will Starling; Vancouver young-adult author Melanie Jackson; Daphne Wood, the Vancouver Public Library’s director, planning and development; Julia Denholm, dean, Arts & Sciences, Capilano University; Monique Sherrett, principal at Boxcar Marketing and founder of somisguided.com; Trevor Battye, a partner in Clevers Media; and Vancouver Sun’s Tracy Sherlock and Bev Wake.