Biggles and The Rescue Flight
Aug. 2nd, 2023 11:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosanicusAs I am currently in the unenviable position of having seventeen competing things my brain wants to be doing and therefore incapable of doing any of them: here are my thoughts on The Rescue Flight.
It's such a weird book! I think I mentioned before that I really liked the opening, and that still remains true: the moment when the headmaster is telling Thirty that his brother has been killed and starts to cry is genuinely quite affecting, especially as it sets Thirty off and you realise that he really is just a teenager. Then he gets told he's Lord Fortymore and he decides to engage in a functionally hopeless mission (the odds of success really were microscopic, it's lucky he's in a book!) instead of mourning his brother at all. Obviously within the book this turns out fine but if Forty actually was dead it would read very differently. The scene where he goes to his family home in London and the butler cries on him was also really something.
I liked the concerns that slipped in throughout the book because of his and Rip's particular method of arriving in France. The fact they don't have any luggage, and that they can't pay their mess fees or go out to an estaminet because they didn't bring any money at all are the types of practicalities a pair of teenage boys would absolutely forget about in their haste to cross the Channel.
He and Rip have a very sweet friendship (and of course because of who I am I was relishing all the meaningful glances etc etc) but I do think it fades into the background as the book moves on in favour of the Thirty&Forty brother relationship, which was significantly less convincing. Having googled it I have learned that WEJ did have a younger brother but he seems uninvested in making the reader particularly care about Forty beyond the obvious - that he's important to Thirty and so much be important to us - and so Forty as a character is basically just a cardboard cutout labelled 'BIG BROTHER'. The missing moment of Forty realising his younger brother has (illegally) come to rescue him feels like a huge oversight. Also the fact they're called Thirty and Forty is objectively distracting to read, sorry not sorry to public school nicknames, you are all silly.
The outside POV on Biggles and Algy was probably my favourite side-effect of the switch in perspective. We once again hear about Biggles' little graven lines and his delicate features (<3 <3 <3) and also get to know more about Algy as the carefree teenager rather than the somewhat jaded adult (although still always ready to rib Biggles at the slightest opportunity, they are perfect to me). I particularly enjoyed all the times Biggles tells Thirty he's definitely going to get shot for going along with his plans and still does it anyway. Biggles your death wish is showing.
Thirty is a perfectly servicable protagonist most of the time, though. I think he has flairs of brilliance in a slightly different way to Biggles - he just reads as slightly younger, as he ought to, and clearly lacking in experience. The panic he has when he sets the plane on fire and realises the mackintosh is still inside was the kind of mistake you can imagine a novice in espionage making, and the fact he then treks across the countryside wearing a shirt he stole from a scarecrow is great comic imagery. Even if he then gets rumbled by his field boots, which he completely forgot about. His little turn as a German spy was also great, I love the sort of on-the-spot thinking that Johns is sometimes very good at. It's the sort of thing only Thirty could do in the story, which makes sense as the entire setup of his spying in the first place was a bit contrived (oh Biggles, you don't speak German do you? as if they are not in Belgium or possibly France and Biggles (as far as I recall) does at this point speak French) but does justify itself in the moment he convinces a group of German soldiers that the escaped POW is actually another German spy. Excellent stuff.
I also enjoyed the anti-war message of the whole thing, although the ending does go back on that message somewhat by showing that Thirty is going to stay with the squadron. One imagines that after he conks out in the chair at the end someone has to wake him up and shepherd him to bed (it's Rip, it's definitely Rip), at which point he can have the spectacular meltdown he deserves after all the strain of the past few weeks.
Overall it was enjoyable, enough so that I did pick up a copy that I found at the charity shop while I was still reading my library copy, but not one I'm likely to revisit in its entirety for a while.
I was hoping to write a sort of epilogue to the story set during WW2, or even afterwards, but my creative juices are not flowing in that direction today. Mostly I imagine that Forty has regained his position as Lord Fortymore, got married, and left Thirty free to live under the radar as a confirmed bachelor in London - much like Biggles & Co. - with his old war buddy Rip, and both have professions on the exempt list from conscription. They probably have a dog and spend their weekends at the aerodrome.
We are solidly into week two of the summer holidays which is my excuse for my brain needing some oil a la the tin man. Next week my fiancee is visiting (we are at our parents' houses for the summer, the luxury of the life of supply teachers) and we're going wedding dress shopping so hopefully that'll kickstart something romantic in there!
It's such a weird book! I think I mentioned before that I really liked the opening, and that still remains true: the moment when the headmaster is telling Thirty that his brother has been killed and starts to cry is genuinely quite affecting, especially as it sets Thirty off and you realise that he really is just a teenager. Then he gets told he's Lord Fortymore and he decides to engage in a functionally hopeless mission (the odds of success really were microscopic, it's lucky he's in a book!) instead of mourning his brother at all. Obviously within the book this turns out fine but if Forty actually was dead it would read very differently. The scene where he goes to his family home in London and the butler cries on him was also really something.
I liked the concerns that slipped in throughout the book because of his and Rip's particular method of arriving in France. The fact they don't have any luggage, and that they can't pay their mess fees or go out to an estaminet because they didn't bring any money at all are the types of practicalities a pair of teenage boys would absolutely forget about in their haste to cross the Channel.
He and Rip have a very sweet friendship (and of course because of who I am I was relishing all the meaningful glances etc etc) but I do think it fades into the background as the book moves on in favour of the Thirty&Forty brother relationship, which was significantly less convincing. Having googled it I have learned that WEJ did have a younger brother but he seems uninvested in making the reader particularly care about Forty beyond the obvious - that he's important to Thirty and so much be important to us - and so Forty as a character is basically just a cardboard cutout labelled 'BIG BROTHER'. The missing moment of Forty realising his younger brother has (illegally) come to rescue him feels like a huge oversight. Also the fact they're called Thirty and Forty is objectively distracting to read, sorry not sorry to public school nicknames, you are all silly.
The outside POV on Biggles and Algy was probably my favourite side-effect of the switch in perspective. We once again hear about Biggles' little graven lines and his delicate features (<3 <3 <3) and also get to know more about Algy as the carefree teenager rather than the somewhat jaded adult (although still always ready to rib Biggles at the slightest opportunity, they are perfect to me). I particularly enjoyed all the times Biggles tells Thirty he's definitely going to get shot for going along with his plans and still does it anyway. Biggles your death wish is showing.
Thirty is a perfectly servicable protagonist most of the time, though. I think he has flairs of brilliance in a slightly different way to Biggles - he just reads as slightly younger, as he ought to, and clearly lacking in experience. The panic he has when he sets the plane on fire and realises the mackintosh is still inside was the kind of mistake you can imagine a novice in espionage making, and the fact he then treks across the countryside wearing a shirt he stole from a scarecrow is great comic imagery. Even if he then gets rumbled by his field boots, which he completely forgot about. His little turn as a German spy was also great, I love the sort of on-the-spot thinking that Johns is sometimes very good at. It's the sort of thing only Thirty could do in the story, which makes sense as the entire setup of his spying in the first place was a bit contrived (oh Biggles, you don't speak German do you? as if they are not in Belgium or possibly France and Biggles (as far as I recall) does at this point speak French) but does justify itself in the moment he convinces a group of German soldiers that the escaped POW is actually another German spy. Excellent stuff.
I also enjoyed the anti-war message of the whole thing, although the ending does go back on that message somewhat by showing that Thirty is going to stay with the squadron. One imagines that after he conks out in the chair at the end someone has to wake him up and shepherd him to bed (it's Rip, it's definitely Rip), at which point he can have the spectacular meltdown he deserves after all the strain of the past few weeks.
Overall it was enjoyable, enough so that I did pick up a copy that I found at the charity shop while I was still reading my library copy, but not one I'm likely to revisit in its entirety for a while.
I was hoping to write a sort of epilogue to the story set during WW2, or even afterwards, but my creative juices are not flowing in that direction today. Mostly I imagine that Forty has regained his position as Lord Fortymore, got married, and left Thirty free to live under the radar as a confirmed bachelor in London - much like Biggles & Co. - with his old war buddy Rip, and both have professions on the exempt list from conscription. They probably have a dog and spend their weekends at the aerodrome.
We are solidly into week two of the summer holidays which is my excuse for my brain needing some oil a la the tin man. Next week my fiancee is visiting (we are at our parents' houses for the summer, the luxury of the life of supply teachers) and we're going wedding dress shopping so hopefully that'll kickstart something romantic in there!
no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 07:18 pm (UTC)But then the point at which the tension of "is Forty alive, will they find him" gets deflated and the book is by no means over yet - I actually put it down for a while at that point, and finished it eventually, but never with as much enjoyment as the first half. It just feels like it becomes a different book and one I didn't like nearly as well - as you say, Forty isn't much of a character (he's way more interesting as a Maguffin than as someone who's actually involved in the plot), and I felt like Thirty became less interesting when he was a) mostly playing off Forty, and b) more experienced and less of a neophyte. I also struggled a bit with Thirty and Forty as names, but I think this was less of a problem when it was just Thirty, but when it was entire scenes of Thirty and Forty interacting with each other - Johns, *please*. The more of a standard Biggles adventure it became, the more I wanted it to actually be about Biggles instead of These Other Guys (although yeah, some of the spy stuff could only be done by someone who's not Biggles, and would've had a very different flavor if it was Biggles pulling it off).
no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 08:19 pm (UTC)Also definitely agree that I wanted it to be About Biggles by the end of it. I can see why Johns tried this as an experiment but I'm definitely glad he went back to primarily having Biggles as our POV character, even if I enjoyed the opportunity to see him from the outside.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-02 11:11 pm (UTC)