Flight: A Novel

by Victoria Glendinning

Overview

From the award-winning author of Electricity - an absorbing and finely-drawn tale of professional and personal romance in modern Europe.

Martagon, a young and talented engineer and a loner by nature, has devoted his life to his career -- occasionally, and regretfully, sacrificing friendship and family for professional success. He accepts a position masterminding the construction of new, high-tech airport in France, applying his cutting-edge expertise to build it almost entirely of glass.

The land and vineyards on which the airport will be built belonged to a feuding brother and sister. It is Marina, the beautiful, flamboyant, and completely irresistible sister, with whom Martagon falls in love for the first time in his life. The detached and rational engineer is thrown completely off balance, begins questioning the ambitions he once took for granted. He takes risks to be with Marina, compromises himself -- professionally and emotionally -- a mistake that could cost him everything he has struggled to achieve.

Written with unusual urgency and perception about the relations between men and women, Victoria Glendinning's Flight is a story of passionate love, morality, self-discovery, professional ethics -- of what happens when solid ground disappears from below, and the only options left are to either soar or fall.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466873599
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/10/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	281 KB

About the Author

Victoria Glendinning has written biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, and Jonathan Swift, and won the Whitbread Award for her 1992 biography of Trollope. Her novels The Grown-Ups and Electricity received great critical acclaim. She divides her time between London, Provence, and Ireland.

Victoria Glendinning is a biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. Her biographies include A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography), Jonathan Swift, Leonard Woolf and a biography of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. Her novels include The Grown-Ups, Electricity, Flight and The Butcher's Daughter. She is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a CBE in 1998.

Editorial Reviews

Glendinning is the author of deft biographies of Swift, Trollope, and Elizabeth Bowen, among others, and in this novel she delineates character masterfully. Her protagonist is an aloof English structural engineer whose specialty is glass and whose innovations have made him a celebrity on the international design circuit. But his capacity to bear emotional loads has never been tested until he meets a French socialite whose ancestral château is to become the hotel for an airport he is designing. Glendinning has researched her architecture, and her glass, and she ingeniously explores the theme of responsibility in both work and love, managing to fashion her apparently airy material into a satisfying whole.

The New Yorker

Take a globetrotting English engineer; have him fall for a glamorous Frenchwoman; stir well; add a second woman and a dash of glitz. That’s the recipe for this third fiction from Glendinning (Electricity, 1995, etc.), best known for her literary biographies. The engineer is the 38-year-old Martagon. It’s an exciting time for the world (the cusp of the third millennium) and a welcome one for his cutting-edge engineering skills (glass is his specialty). He’d started out with a paternalistic firm and overseen its merger with a cutthroat competitor, inadvertently betraying his ex-employer but gaining a friend in Giles Harper, his new partner. A loner with no permanent girlfriend, Martagon finds an alternative family in the very married Giles and Amanda, along with Giles’s "frail" sister Julie, who is raising her son alone after being abandoned by her Ethiopian husband. In time, Martagon parts from the overly aggressive Giles but works for him as a consultant on a glitzy high-tech airport in Provence, where he meets the dazzling redhead Marina, who is selling the family chateau for conversion into an airport hotel. For both, this is the Big One: no-holds-barred romantic love, expressed in language unfailingly banal. The two discuss living together, choosing to ignore the cultural differences between French and Anglo-Saxon that Diane Johnson has dissected so brilliantly in her novels. Meanwhile, in attending to Marina, Martagon has overlooked a flaw in the terminal roof, setting the project back five months. He returns to London, where he unaccountably yet repeatedly beds the frail Julie. Marina finds out. As he had after the airport debacle, Martagon reproaches himself for dishonorablebehavior. ("Honor" and "balance" are concepts that Glendinning parades frequently, perhaps to give ballast to the fluff.) Marina forgives him, but then he loses her outright, because of his own poor scheduling. Time wounds all heels, they say, and Martagon does have a few bad moments, but little increase in self-knowledge. About par for this superficial man and superficial novel.

Kirkus Reviews