Graham Coster

The Wild Blue Yonder is a collection that brings together writing that puts into words the exhilarating, alarming, and sometimes sublimely mystical sensation of flight. The story of aviation is almost exactly concurrent with the history of the 20th century. The Wild Blue Yonder contains some of the very best writing about flight, from the lonely adventure of pioneers like Beryl Markham and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, to the horror of aerial bombardment during the Spanish Civil War and the Vietnam War, from Chuck Yeager's breaking of the sound barrier to the musings of such writers as Tom Wolfe, Julian Barnes, Nicholson Baker and V. S. Naipaul.… (plus d'informations)

It was the obscure legend of the Imperial Airways (later BOAC) Short S.23 'C' Class “Empire” Flying Boat “Corsair” (G-ADVB), rescued from the Belgian Congo in an epic salvage operation, that fired Graham Coster's quest for the lost world of the flying boat. Coster's journey begins in Southampton, from where Imperial Airways' "Empire" boats departed to fly up the Nile on their way to South Africa, and takes him to the flying boats' old haunts in Uganda, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe, from Lake Naivasha to Victoria Falls. More than a travel book, this text is a piece history, and a journey to a vanished age when air travel was truly an adventure that could change your life. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/04/historybooks.gilesfoden… (plus d'informations)

"When you watched it now you knew it could have no use whatsoever – look at it! Something out of Jules Verne! So you could just wonder at it as a work of art, pure spectacle – that it had been built at all. I was looking at nothing other than a flying ship. 'Oh, it's all epic stuff, isn't it?' said the flight engineer briskly. 'History now.'" (pg. 35)

A surprisingly touching book on the appeal of the flying boats. Unlike normal seaplanes, where the landing wheels are replaced with floats so they can land skimpily on water, flying boats were magnificent, propeller-driven airliners where the fuselage itself was shaped into a hull. It was a plane in the sky and a boat in the water, and for a time in the 1930s, they were how the moneyed imperial classes got around the Empire and the New World.

Author Graham Coster eagerly chronicles these halcyon days, delivering in his beautiful prose accounts of pre-war travel to exotic African locations (back when travel meant luxury and watching the sun go down in the middle of nowhere), the wartime service of the flying boats, and of the post-war attempts to reintroduce them to a world which had moved on, not only to jet engines and plentiful runways left over from the war, but to the emerging middle classes who preferred the cheaper, everyman travel of American Boeings and Pan-Am to the old-fashioned imperial opulence. Framing this period is the story of the flying boat Corsair, which was downed in a remote part of the Congo and salvaged thanks to a difficult engineering operation that required the building of a local shantytown dubbed 'Corsairville'.

In truth, the Corsairville story itself doesn't take up much room in this already rather short book. This actually works to the book's benefit, as you are given what you want to know without any padding. I do wish we learned more about the flying boats in wartime – the Short Sunderlands saw plenty of action – but both the pre-war and post-war accounts are magical. Coster is particularly good at evoking the feel of a flying boat: not only its aesthetic majesty but how it felt to take off and land on water, with the freedom of landing just about anywhere in the remotest parts of the world.

Coster also intersperses the story with his own accounts travelling and researching for the book, and for large portions of Corsairville it is more travelogue than history book. At first I was sceptical of this personal approach, and in truth even though the travel stuff is pleasant enough and Coster makes some good observations, I always found myself wanting to return to the story of the Empire boats and of the Corsair. But this approach ends up elevating the book beyond a mere chronicle, however lovingly crafted such a chronicle might be: Coster ends up delivering some incisive and profound comments on the appeal of this peculiar and majestic specimen, both a nautical and aeronautical beast, and on the peculiarly English strain of nostalgia. It is wistful and inspiring but also serious about the flaws in the British method: one of the most subtle and gentle reckonings of Empire I have read.

It is strange to think nowadays, in Britain in 2017 when fragile doomsayers go into hysterics about the decision to leave the bloated European federal project, that even after the exhausting trials of the Second World War, the country was in some ways still in its primacy, particularly in aeronautics. Fresh off the heroics of the Spitfire and all the other glorious British birds of 1939-45, Britain was producing such wonderful if anachronistic craft like the flying boats and also pioneering civil jet aviation with the Comet. Even decades later, the truly innovative Harrier vertical jumpjet was earning kills over the Falklands, with even the Americans looking on enviously and covetously at the technology. Corsairville taps into this paradoxically fantastical reality, of the small nation punching above its weight in the world, and it is heartbreaking too to see Coster writing in the present tense (the book was published in the year 2000) about the supersonic Concorde. How far we've fallen since, when we were already bruised.

Corsairville is one of the few books that captures Britishness in all its facets: sentimental, nostalgic, outpaced, and yet innovative, unique, willing to muck in; as Coster writes on page 33, a land of "magnificent folly". The flying boats, he writes, "hark back to a rarefied world that ought to have existed – where a flying machine might skid down on to the water as gracefully as a swan, and spend a life bobbing on the waves as oblivious as an eider" (pg. 26). This was the world of fantasy the British seemed to half live in. A world that ought to have existed. Remarkably, thanks to the efforts of the sort of people chronicled in Corsairville, fragments of that world once did.… (plus d'informations)