"CHILDHOOD is, among, other things, a certain altitude, a certain relationship with the earth, a question of dimensions which will never again be experienced in life, a point off view held with tenacity which, once lost, will fade from the memory, leaving no trace," writes Daniele del Giudice in the early chapters of Take-off So, he would have us believe, his obsession with flying is in some part an attempt to regain the lost altitude of childhood.
Del Giudice recalls that as a boy he imitated being an aeroplane, not a pilot, he insists, but the thing itself; he became "a fighter-bomber of a child". This identification with the inanimate informs his appropriately slim volume (a small, light thing). On the dust jacket, Pierre Lepape of Le Mon de describes Take-Off as a "blissful meditation"; I found it more serendipitous than reflective, more cold heaven than sheer bliss.
Perhaps it is the translation from the original Italian, or the persistent use of the second person singular which makes the book so cool and bloodless. The "you" he constantly addresses is not the reader, but himself. "If there existed some compartment of the memory reserved for first times, you think as you check that everything is switched off, you would place first take-off alongside first love-making, for the intensity of the two is identical, however curious it may seem that for you the first and most overwhelming fusion with another human being should be put on the same level as the first and most total loneliness of all - the utter solitude of the solo pilot."
While reading Take-Off I was `reminded of a book similar in intent' - Charles Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur, a brilliant, erudite and passionate celebration of the swimmer and that other element of solipsism, water.
Del Giudice's work seemed curiously arid, in comparison. An Italian novelist, he wrote Take-Off on the urgings of Fellini, who wanted to see in print all those stories del Giudice told about flying. And perhaps there's the rub. Did he write the book only because the great master of Italian cinema told him to? For whatever reason, what del Giudice achieves is to explain his "mania" for flying, but he never communicates his passion for it.
He takes off with an account of his first solo flight. Our next touchdown is an imagined encounter with the ghosts of two pilots who are condemned in del Guidice's scheme of things to wander at night around the airfield from which they took off, endlessly speculating about the dying seconds of their last flight.
This spectral atmosphere pervades much of del Guidice's work. One chapter recreates the journey of, an internal Alitalia flight to Palermo in 1980 which crashed mysteriously with the loss of 81 lives. Another takes us on Antoine de Saint Exupery's last foray in the skies. Both accounts are poignant and very, spooky, though del Giudice punctuates his text with odd, pragmatic, ghoulish details such as the accident investigator who spends his time listening to the flight recorders of doomed flights and the messages of their dead pilots. "I'm interested," he says, "in the tone of the voices."
It must be a blokey thing, but I could have done without the 30 or so pages on the exploits of war pilots. All those Spitfires and bomb drops and male bonding was just a little too Boy's Ownish for my taste and I was glad when we rose to more philosophical heights. Here del Guidice is in his element. The pilot's expertise, he declares, is in error. In life, he writes, to choose a wrong wife or a wrong lift (an interesting conjunction!) are seen as matters of varying gravity, but in piloting an aircraft, an act of petty oversight could be fatal due to the "obvious but decisive fact that in flight there can be no stopping".
He is lyrical on clouds - "neither an object nor a state but a constant transition" - and the codified language of flying, "a lesser alphabet with no ambition to coin words... a lexicon at the service of an alphabet and not vice-versa".
And he has some interesting observations on the concept of nobility and flight. "The human spirit needs time and space to uncover its inner darkness, to display its ignominy and depravity, and on a plane there is too little of both time and space, in other words, while airborne, human beings are temporarily deprived of their own Evil, reduced to bewildered silence in the face of procedural routine." Ponder that on your next trip to London.
But the last word in del Giudice's book belongs to the ghosts and the machines. "At times," he writes "in these old airfields all those who ever failed to reach their destination seem to be huddled there, now invisible, luggage clasped in hand waiting for relatives to collect them exactly as once - who knows when? - those relatives had awaited with growing despair the arrival of the loved ones who would never appear."