Things weren't all roses for pilots in WW1. I enjoyed the quick read. ( )

Set during the height of World War I in January 1918, Goshawk Squadron follows the misfortunes of a British flight squadron on the Western Front. For Stanley Woolley, commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron, the romance of chivalry in the clouds is just a myth. The code he drums into his men is simple and savage: shoot the enemy in the back before he knows you're there. Even so, he believes the whole squadron will be dead within three months. A monumental work at the time of its original release, Booker-shortlisted Goshawk Squadron is now viewed as a classic in the mode of Catch 22. Wry, brutal, cynical and hilarious, the men of Robinson's squadron are themselves an embodiment of the maddening contradictions of war: as much a refined troop of British gentleman as they are a viscous band of brothers hell-bent on staying alive and winning the war.

Excellent novel, places you firmly amongst the young men of the RFC and the world around them. ( )

"There's no room for eccentrics in this war, Woolley." (pg. 243).

Having read all of the RAF Quartet (starting with Piece of Cake), I knew what to expect from Derek Robinson's Goshawk Squadron. I have a love-hate relationship with his books, enjoying the descriptions of flying, the historical research and the unsentimental approach to death in the plot, whilst hating the overcooked cynicism that borders on nihilism, the miserable-bastard characters and the author's overt agenda regarding historical revisionism. Goshawk Squadron is no different, though I rather hoped it would be considering it was his first novel and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Much like his later Battle of Britain mythbuster Piece of Cake, Robinson's purpose here is to destroy the Biggles myth, that of the 'knights of the sky' fighting a decent war like gentlemen. It is a worthy aim, and you get a sense of the horror of aerial warfare in Robinson's books. But he always overdoes it: the war was horrible, so everything involved with it must be horrible – personally, professionally, conceptually. Woolley, the author's mouthpiece here, is a cartoonish bastard for most of the novel and though he does show some depth at the end (the line quoted above is a piece of irony), a more balanced approach would have served Robinson's aims better. His argument would be all the more forceful for being the gentler. Instead, we get OTT cynicism, which means that sparks fly and it can be entertaining, but it can also become tedious and exhausting.

But I keep coming back for more where this author is concerned, and no wonder: the prose is lucid and impeccably paced and the history is well-researched. We don't get a sense of the planes in Goshawk Squadron as much as we did in the RAF Quartet, which is a shame, but the book's later chapters do ably express the chaos in the Allied lines caused by the German offensive in 1918. There was a return to fluid battlefield warfare in that final spring, and Robinson's book does well to remind us of it when our popular conception of the Great War remains one of trenches and a static front. There is more to admire in Robinson than to decry, and after five books I feel like I have become inoculated to his excesses. Whenever I've recovered from the last one of his books, I always find myself happy to crack open another. ( )

It is Woolley. Just needed to correct that spelling after the other reviewers' attempts! A brutal telling of the story of the RFC during the final months of the war in 1918. These men are young and under very little illusion that they could be shot dead at any moment in the sky. Therefore we receive snapshots of their dogfights and also interestingly their recreational time which in one scene in particular is actually more shocking than the fighting itself! Definitely NOT Biggles! ( )