Rory MacLean is a writer, broadcaster, blogger and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His nine books, including UK bestsellers Stalin’s Nose and Under the Dragon, have challenged and invigorated travel writing, and – according to the late John Fowles – are among works that ‘marvellously explain why literature still lives’. He has won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England as well as a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He has written and presented over 50 BBC radio programmes and worked on movies with Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie. Born in Canada and resident for many years in Britain, Rory now divides his time between London and Berlin. Other books by Rory MacLean: Stalin’s Nose The Oatmeal Ark Under the Dragon Next Exit Magic Kingdom Magic Bus Missing Lives Gift of Time www.rorymaclean.com ‘Rory MacLean is one of the most strikingly original and talented travel writers of our generation.’ Katie Hickman ‘A book that mixes lyricism with humour and compassion… MacLean’s writing is at once whimsical and serious, funny and painful… an intimate portrait of the sort of community we might not otherwise have encountered outside fiction.’ Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times ‘A marvellously compelling story. An intimate geography of the author’s own heart and a masterly observation of the power of the story to comfort, strengthen and transform the hearts of humanity at large. Destined to become a classic.’ Jamie Jauncey, The Scotsman ‘Touching, fresh and extremely funny. MacLean’s prose moves elegantly from the elegiac to the ironic, from the sad to the grotesque or comic. A triumph.’ TLS ‘An extraordinary work, curious and entertaining, tantalizing, often moving and above all entirely original – like everything MacLean writes, it’s in a genre of its own.’ Jan Morris ‘The heart-warming evocation of one man’s loving obsession: lyrical, funny, compassionate.’ Colin Thubron ‘Anyone who loves Crete should enjoy this book. And anyone who does not love Crete is only half alive.’ William Palmer, Literary Review ‘Unbridled humour, suspense… [characters] spring from the page as if from myth.’ Scotland on Sunday Tauris Parke Paperbacks is an imprint of I.B.Tauris. It is dedicated to publishing books in accessible paperback editions for the serious general reader within a wide range of categories, including biography, history, travel, art and the ancient world. The list includes select, critically acclaimed works of top quality writing by distinguished authors that continue to challenge, to inform and to inspire. These are books that possess those subtle but intrinsic elements that mark them out as something exceptional. The Colophon of Tauris Parke Paperbacks is a representation of the ancient Egyptian ibis, sacred to the god Thoth, who was himself often depicted in the form of this most elegant of birds. Thoth was credited in antiquity as the scribe of the ancient Egyptian gods and as the inventor of writing and was associated with many aspects of wisdom and learning. FALLING FOR ICARUS A Journey Among the Cretans Rory MacLean Foreword by Robert Macfarlane TPP TAURIS PARKE PAPERBACKS New paperback edition published in 2012 by Tauris Parke Paperbacks An imprint of I.B.Tauris and Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 First published in 2004 by Viking Copyright © Rory MacLean, 2004, 2005, 2012 Foreword copyright © Robert Macfarlane, 2012 Illustrations copyright © Philip Hood Cover image: ‘Flying over water’ © Irene Lamprakou / Getty Images The right of Rory MacLean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84885 956 2 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Sweden by ScandBook AB CONTENTS New foreword by Robert Macfarlane vii Map xii 1. Without Wings 1 2. Beyond My Control 4 3. Messa Anissari 11 4. Flight, and My Part in Its Discovery 22 5. Winging It 36 6. To Make One Aeroplane 48 7. How Ulysses Went Mad 64 8. In a Clearing Sky 71 9. The Barber 84 10. Greeks Bearing Gifts 91 11. Trouble in Paradise 105 12. Little Hairs 114 13. Loop the Loop 128 14. Heavy Metal 150 15. Bones, or How Aphrodite Lost her Virginity 159 16. Mach 0.8 172 17. Born Again 179 18. Lease on Life 197 19. Building Icarus 208 20. Something Old, Something New 218 21. Down to Earth 245 22. Some Hope 252 23. An Old Story 261 24. On a Wing and a Prayer 268 25. Summer Time 284 26. Yes of Course Maybe Why Not? 292 27. On Top of Crete 299 28. Clear Prop! 310 29. Up, Up and ... 316 30. Elements 328 Acknowledgements 333 Afterword by Katrin MacLean 335 Foreword The history of aviation is filled with people – mostly men – for whom the desire to fly was a compulsion. Wilbur Wright spoke of having contracted a ‘disease’ in the form of his ‘belief that flight is possible to man’. Otto Lilienthal – author of the classic Birdflight As The Basis of Aviation (1889) – made his first attempt at flight while still at school (wearing a pair of strap-on arm-wings; he failed), and subsequently constructed an artificial hill near Berlin for the purpose of launching test glides. The French writer and aeronaut Antoine de Saint-Exupery could hardly bear to be grounded, flying perilous missions as a fighter-pilot long after he could have retired. The diminutive dandy Alberto Santos-Dumont (5’1” tall and only 100lb in weight; vital statistics for a man who always wanted to be a bird) grew up on his father’s coffee plantation in Brazil watching eagles ‘flying so high and soaring on their great outstretched wings’, fell in love with the ideals of ‘space and freedom’, and vowed to follow the raptors into their aerial kingdom. Rory MacLean joined this ragged aeronautical dynasty of eccentrics, obsessives and visionaries after the death of his beloved mother, Joan, from cancer. His grief at the loss was so powerful that it left him destroyed, dismantled. All he knew in the dark days after her death was that he wanted – no, he needed – to build his own aeroplane and take flight: this was ‘the single clear certainty’ visible to him, his ‘compulsion’. So MacLean and his wife Katrin moved to a village in the north-west of Crete, set under the Lefka Ori – the White Mountains. And there, as you’ll hear, over the course of six months, within the hard bright light of the Mediterranean, MacLean sought to reassemble himself by constructing from scratch a one-man aircraft in which he might lift off – and so acquit himself of grief’s gravity. Broken into pieces, he worked to put himself back together. A symbolic act, then, and a ritual one: penitential, respectful, the patient literalisation of a metaphor. There is, of course, nothing purely symbolic about flying, or about its opposite, falling. In 1896, on what was due to be his last test flight, Otto Lilienthal’s unstable gliding apparatus lost its balance ‘at considerable height’ and he dropped to his death. Santos-Dumont, after surviving a series of elegant airship crashes in Paris, became guiltily obsessed with viii Falling for Icarus the idea that aeronautical technology had been turned to the inhumane ends of bombing and invasion, lost his mind and hanged himself with a pair of red neckties from a door-handle in São Paulo. Saint-Exupery disappeared, probably in combat, over the Mediterranean in 1944, while flying for the Free French Forces of De Gaulle. And we all know what happened to Icarus. As the poet Paul Claudel nicely put it, ‘we lack wings to fly, but we always have strength enough to fall’. So MacLean’s quest needs to be understood as occurring both in the realm of the allegorically symbolic and that of the riskily real. There was a very real chance of emotional healing involved in his undertaking, but there was also a very real chance of physical injury. The doubleness of this wonderful book, its simultaneous inhabiting of the actual and the mythical, is one of its most distinctive aspects. And one of its many achievements is that almost everything within it takes loft as metaphor. Out there on Crete, nothing can be only itself. There are, for instance, so many aeronauts in this book, flitting suggestively through its pages. MacLean himself, of course, the principal pilótos; but also the trapped goldfinch in the schoolroom that he releases (discreetly recalling the final flight of his mother’s soul, set free through an opened window); the wheeling bats at dusk; the ‘Winged Priest’; and dear, tough, lover-emeritus Aphrodite, lifted aloft after death on the shoulders of six strong men and carried, airborne, from her house – the way, surely, she would most have wanted to go. All the acts of flight in the book are charged with a meaning that exceeds simple appearance. There is, to my mind, no one who writes quite like Rory MacLean. If I were forced to reach for a comparison, I would pause over Bruce Chatwin as a possibility, but then probably stretch far, further back: to John Mandeville, to St Brendan and to Marco Polo. These men made their ‘wonder-voyages’ and returned bearing tales that were not to be submitted to the usual tests of verifiability and falsifiability, but in which the actual and the miraculous rubbed shoulders, and in which genres and forms promiscuously coupled and bred. They told piebald, pidgin, patchwork, mongrel stories, then: but books whose unreliability was not mere whimsy, but aspired to a different kind of truth-telling. They sought, in their inventiveness, to pattern reality into a greater clarity. Falling for Icarus, like all of MacLean’s books, is a wonder-voyage in which the speculative, the imagined and the verifiable tinge one another. We can’t ignore this aspect of the book, partly because MacLean appears to know things that he could not know (the inhabitation of the pasts of Aphrodite and Ulysses, for instance), partly because of the magical- realist moments (the thrown dinner plate that sails through two windows and smites a teenage masturbator, the canary that never sings when Foreword ix spicy sausage is served for dinner, the gods with walk-on parts), but also because again and again MacLean tips us off that all is not perhaps as it was. ‘This is what happened’, the book confidently begins: the classic declaration of the unreliable narrator. ‘This, and everything I will tell you, is true’, one of the villagers declares. ‘A good story was valued over hard facts’, notes MacLean of the oral culture of the village. ‘It was the first of many tall stories’, he reflects, listening to a Cretan speak. I think of MacLean’s stories not as ‘tall’ but as ‘high’; a category difference. Tall stories are exaggerations, distortions. High stories take flight, gain fresh perspective, occupy a different atmosphere. ‘Fiction is woven into all’, MacLean begins his acknowledgements, ‘Sas efharisto olous therma apo kardias’, and his own weaving of fiction into travelogue has invigorated and continues to inspire the form for twenty years now. In Stalin’s Nose (1992) and The Oatmeal Ark (1997) he anticipated features of the hybrid work of W.G. Sebald, whose The Rings of Saturn is the most influential travel book (if that is what it is) to have been published in my lifetime. MacLean’s wilful unreliability is different in manner to Sebald’s lugubrious ‘prose fictions’, of course, not least because Sebald is rarely funny whereas MacLean is superbly witty (particularly in his sparkling dialogues: a writing skill honed during his decade as a screenwriter and filmmaker). For all the metaphysics and myth, MacLean knows also how to keep himself firmly grounded. The opening scene plays this out: MacLean (or at least our narrator, who isn’t quite identical with our author) is about to launch himself from the wall of a hillside ruin – in a suicidal fugue, or a dream of flying, it is not quite clear which. Then – clamp! – round his ankles slip a pair of ‘earthy’ hands, locking him down. ‘This is how I met Yióryio’, says MacLean. And Yióryio – like the other villagers – is crucial to MacLean’s healing, and vital to his book. What MacLean knew was that he needed ballast for his writing’s loftier ambitions. The villagers provide this necessary weight. Crete is a mythical terrain, a crucible of civilization – but its contemporary inhabitants as we meet them are drinkers, farters, fighters, friends and fornicators, like the rest of us, and the landscape is one of rubbish, alcoholism, road traffic accidents and historical atrocity, as well as of sunsets, ruins and emerald seas. Throughout, the airy finds its match in the earthy, levity in gravity, flight in fall, and pathos in bathos (which Alexander Pope nicknamed ‘the art of sinking’). It is all beautifully balanced (unlike MacLean’s aircraft, as it turns out). There is a fascinating absence in this book. MacLean’s mother, Joan, barely exists. She is scarcely evoked. Her death prompts MacLean’s journey to Crete and triggers his quest for flight, but after that, well, she almost vanishes. There is a trueness to this absence, it seems to me,