Flight

The New Yorker

Glendinning is the author of deft biographies of Swift, Trollope, and Elizabeth Bowen, among others, and in this novel she delineates character masterfully. Her protagonist is an aloof English structural engineer whose specialty is glass and whose innovations have made him a celebrity on the international design circuit. But his capacity to bear emotional loads has never been tested until he meets a French socialite whose ancestral château is to become the hotel for an airport he is designing. Glendinning has researched her architecture, and her glass, and she ingeniously explores the theme of responsibility in both work and love, managing to fashion her apparently airy material into a satisfying whole.

Publishers Weekly

Glendinning (Electricity) turns her cool, astringent eye and crisp prose to an engrossing story of ethical choices. Handsome and brilliant, Martagon Foley settled on a career as an engineer in London because it was "a way of making and doing not unlike the way of a creative artist, and not incompatible either with being a good person or making a good income"-aspirations that are sorely tested in this novel. In the 1980s, Martagon rose through the ranks at Cox and Co., an international firm of consulting engineers, under the eye of the chairman, Arthur Cox. Unfortunately, as the '90s advance, the firm's profits do not. Prodded by ambitious Giles Harper, Martagon manages a merger of Cox and Harper, against Arthur's wishes. Martagon then becomes an independent contractor, specializing in construction with glass. He's persuaded to consult on a Harper Cox project, designing the Bonplaisir airport in Provence, which is how he meets rich, ravishing Marina de Cabri res, whose family estate, the Ch teau de Bonplaisir, is being converted into the airport hotel. Soon Marina and Martagon have a plan: Martagon will give up his work and live in sybaritic splendor with Marina, designing her house. However, winding up his affairs in London, Martagon somehow finds himself in bed with Julie, Giles's sister. While Julie is neither fashionable nor pretty, she does possess an irresistible gravitas. When Marina finds out, he faces a painful choice: should he abandon Julie to retain Marina? While Glendinning is better known as a literary biographer, she has certainly imbibed the lessons of the masters from her subjects (which have included Elizabeth Bowen and Rebecca West). In her capable hands, the love story once again displays its perennial vitality, but with a contemporary twist that provides a shattering finale. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In her third novel, Whitbread Award-winning biographer Glendinning turns from stories set in the past to a contemporary tale of human foibles. Martagon is an engineer who specializes in construction using that seemingly most fragile of materials, glass, a metaphor woven carefully throughout. As Glendinning observes, quoting from a poem called "The Church Window," "A man who look on glass on it may stay his eye; or if he pleases, though it pass and so the heavens espy." Martagon looks on the women in his life in much the same way, sometimes seeing them as they truly are but more often passing through emotions in an attempt to espy an ideal form of happiness that is always beyond his reach. Ultimately, as his personal and professional lives shatter, Martagon recognizes that some people have an "orientation" to happiness, while for others happiness is not a "natural climate" because they cannot sustain their own extraordinary expectations. While Glendinning provides a fresh perspective on the theme of what it means to be happy, the novel never quite achieves its full potential, partly because the two female characters are not sympathetic enough to make readers care about their struggles to achieve happiness with the flawed Martagon. Nonetheless, Flight is an enjoyable and provocative read that will be in demand where Glendinning's works are known and respected.-Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Take a globetrotting English engineer; have him fall for a glamorous Frenchwoman; stir well; add a second woman and a dash of glitz. That’s the recipe for this third fiction from Glendinning (Electricity, 1995, etc.), best known for her literary biographies. The engineer is the 38-year-old Martagon. It’s an exciting time for the world (the cusp of the third millennium) and a welcome one for his cutting-edge engineering skills (glass is his specialty). He’d started out with a paternalistic firm and overseen its merger with a cutthroat competitor, inadvertently betraying his ex-employer but gaining a friend in Giles Harper, his new partner. A loner with no permanent girlfriend, Martagon finds an alternative family in the very married Giles and Amanda, along with Giles’s "frail" sister Julie, who is raising her son alone after being abandoned by her Ethiopian husband. In time, Martagon parts from the overly aggressive Giles but works for him as a consultant on a glitzy high-tech airport in Provence, where he meets the dazzling redhead Marina, who is selling the family chateau for conversion into an airport hotel. For both, this is the Big One: no-holds-barred romantic love, expressed in language unfailingly banal. The two discuss living together, choosing to ignore the cultural differences between French and Anglo-Saxon that Diane Johnson has dissected so brilliantly in her novels. Meanwhile, in attending to Marina, Martagon has overlooked a flaw in the terminal roof, setting the project back five months. He returns to London, where he unaccountably yet repeatedly beds the frail Julie. Marina finds out. As he had after the airport debacle, Martagon reproaches himself for dishonorablebehavior. ("Honor" and "balance" are concepts that Glendinning parades frequently, perhaps to give ballast to the fluff.) Marina forgives him, but then he loses her outright, because of his own poor scheduling. Time wounds all heels, they say, and Martagon does have a few bad moments, but little increase in self-knowledge. About par for this superficial man and superficial novel.