Books: Landing Gear Exclusive interview with author author Kate Pullinger and a review of her new novel about an aircraft stowaway
Rating: Three Stars
Reviewed by Gabrielle Pantera
“There’s a myth in some parts of the world that you can stowaway on an airplane by climbing up through the landing gear,” says Landing Gear author Kate Pullinger. “But it isn’t true. People who stowaway like this almost always die. A body had landed in a supermarket car park not far from where I live. And over the course of ten years a series of bodies had fallen in or near this London supermarket because it is the place on one of the flight paths into Heathrow where planes lower their landing gear. Using what the journalists discovered about the most recent body, I began to wonder about what would happen if, in fact, the stowaway survived and landed on the car of a London woman.”
In the spring of 2010 the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupts disrupting flights all over Europe. Harriet’s husband Michael can’t get home from New York. Harriet works at a London radio station while her co-workers are stuck abroad. Yacub, a Pakistani migrant worker, is stranded in a Dubai labor camp. Two years later he stows away in the landing gear of a plane. He falls out and lands on Harriet’s car at a supermarket in London. Emily, who works for a TV station, accidentally captures it all on film. The arrival of Yacub changes the lives of Harriet and Emily.
A stowaway falling from a plane and surviving; that’s high concept, literally. But it isn’t the page-turner thriller or laugh-out-loud romantic comedy you might expect. It’s Yacub’s story. Yet it’s written as women’s fiction, a down-the-rabbit-hole Alice in Wonderland story of Harriet and Emily. The head hops and flashbacks may bewilder readers. It jumps around a lot. The best part of the story is Yacub and how he got to the UK. The story covers four years.
“I’ve had the idea for Landing Gear since I first read a newspaper article in the Guardian newspaper here in the UK…… The early response to the book has been very, very heartening and compelling,” says Pullinger, who built a fan base for her book by telling the story in an online multimedia media project called Flight Paths: A Networked Novel (www.flightpaths.net). Pulling did most of her research during that phase, about airplane stowaways and the Icelandic airspace shutdown of 2010.
The Mistress of Nothing, Pullinger’s last novel, won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2009. The Mistress of Nothing is in its second draft as a screenplay being developed by a film production company in Toronto. Pullinger is a Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University. She works at two of its campuses. One is in a stately home just outside Bath in Somerset, and the other in a stately home in Wiltshire. “It’s amazing working on two such beautiful campuses,” she says. “Like going to work in Downton Abbey…except without the servants.” Pullinger lives in London. She was born in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, in Cranbrook, British Columbia.
Landing Gear: A Novel by Kate Pullinger. Hardcover, 304 pages, Publisher: Touchstone; First Edition edition (May 20, 2014). Language: English, ISBN: 9781476751375 $24.00
