Navigation Log

by Martin Corrick (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.80

  When they are born the maid ties a luggage label around Tom's ankle. It is the only way to tell him and William apart. Years later, the loop of string remains; two ordinary boys growing up in England between the wars. Their mother is mostly absent. Their father too has his secrets. Across the road the neighbours watch them become young men. Tom takes after his daredevil uncle, captured by his vision of the aeroplane, how it soars and turns. William is entranced by the power of verse, by words that claim to speak of freedom. And then the war comes. In 1940, Tom is a Spitfire pilot, battling in the skies above Kent. William, a teacher in a progressive school, embarks on a journey of discovery that will end in Canterbury. How will they fare, the pilot and the pilgrim?

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $3.25

  A wonderful, inventive, first novel (Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, is a great fan) set primarily during WW2. A vivid, highly original, funny, bitter-sweet picture of a vanished Britain, beset by order and chaos. The Navigation Log opens in 1918 with the birth of identical twins, Tom and William Anderson. We follow in extraordinary vivid episodes their early life until the autumn of 1940, by which time Tom is a Spitfire pilot, dog fighting over the coast of Kent, while his brother William, a teacher, accompanies his anarchic school Liberty Hall in a lunatic trek across the bomb strewn Kent countryside below. The son of an aircraft engineer himself, Tom's airborne exploits are written with an exceptionally vivid intimacy, while the author's gift for humour is brought to hilarious realisation on the ground beneath. Peopled with deftly memorable characters (the Polish refugee fleeing Europe, the crazed naturist headmaster), the book observes an England that may have vanished, but still resides in many a heart.