May 2024 Book, TransAtlantic

 

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library.

TransAtlantic begins in 1919 with the first nonstop aerial crossing of the Atlantic by two British pilots, John Alcock and Arthur Brown. The pair flew from Newfoundland to Ireland. (Eight years later, Alcock and Brown would be nudged into history's shadows by Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic.) Bring your airsickness bags into this opening chapter because McCann straps readers into that open cockpit and throttles forward on his spinning and spiraling descriptions of early air travel. Alcock and Brown were both veterans of World War I and, in McCann's account of their historic flight, the men are attempting to reclaim flying as a joyous freedom rather than an instrument of death.

Freedom as well as war and peace are the big themes running throughout the other two history-based ocean crossings in this novel: Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in 1845 — during the Great Famine — on a lecture tour to promote his autobiography; and Sen. George Mitchell tirelessly flew back and forth from the U.S. to Northern Ireland in order to broker the peace accord of 1998, the Good Friday Agreement. No doubt recognizing that all this official history is a bit boy heavy, McCann also manufactures some fictional female characters — good women, as it were, standing behind the great men. The women's private life stories silently knit together the public exploits of the gents.

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