Some Things About Flying

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Lila and her married colleague Tom are flying to England for an illicit
affair. Halfway across the Atlantic, one of the engines catches fire,
and it seems likely that the flight will end in disaster. Since they are
both university professors—Lila of English, Tom of history—the scene
appears set to serious present reactions to the prospect of imminent
death.

However, this doesn’t happen. The small cast of characters is made up
of contemporary stereotypes, both intellectually empty and
linguistically slipshod. Indeed, one gets the impression that Lila and
Tom’s university is one in which Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim would
shine as an academic genius. Though the situation contains built-in
suspense, I found myself unable to care very much about whether this
plane of phonies—Barfoot’s modern equivalent to the medieval ship of
fools—lives or dies.

Because I have admired several of Barfoot’s earlier
novels—especially Dancing in the Dark (1982), a remarkable and
absorbing artistic tour de force—this one was a profound
disappointment. She used to possess a gift for presenting women
protagonists impelled toward a new and unexpected course of action, in
novels written with stylistic grace and economy.

Lila’s actions in the last chapter display at least the recognizable
shadow of Barfoot’s earlier skill, and the final pages are the most
interesting in the book. Unfortunately, they come too late. This, then,
is a badly flawed novel on a theme that could have succeeded if the
characters involved were not slovenly, alike in their mental attitudes
and in their speech patterns. Here Barfoot appears to have
forgotten—temporarily, one hopes—that, without mental sustenance and
stylistic dexterity, fiction becomes as shallow as the average in-flight
movie.