THE PRINCE OF THE SKIES by Antonio Iturbe, Translated by Llilit Thwaites

What a joy to read this beautifully written historical novel translated from the Spanish. Flight and the freedom it engenders is at the heart of the book, and is carried in almost every sentence of the story. Yet within this dreamy mesmerising writing, the history of aviation in France between the two world wars is also told. I had no idea that France was so crucial to the development of flight networks and planes during this time.

The story focuses on three pioneering pilots, including the world famous writer/aristocrat/journalist/poet but introverted, ungainly, possibly slightly odd Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - he who wrote the children's story for adults The Little Prince; the rash, bold, crazy fearless Jean Mermoz, and the gentlemanly, classy, good all rounder Henri Guillaumet. These men were all expert and gifted pilots, flying initially in the early days of the novel the flimsiest of machines with only a compass  for a navigational aid. Talk about flying by the seat of your pants! And of course don't forget the saying 'There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots'. We take all the engineering genius of airplanes for granted now, but in the early days of the 21st century, lady luck played a much greater role, possibly the biggest role in whether a pilot and his plane returned to land each day.

So throughout this book there is an essence of danger, tragedy lurking, things going wrong. And they go wrong aplenty - in the Andes, in the desert spaces of Algeria and Morocco - producing great stories of survival, determination and sheer grit. 

The three men all meet when they end up working for a flying mail company based in Toulouse and so begins  a beautiful friendship. The other main character in the novel, also a real person, is Didier Daurat, a WWI flying ace who becomes the Operations Manager for the mail company that employs the three pilots, eventually renamed Aéropostale, then later Air France.  

The lives and achievements of these four men can all be found on-line so won't elaborate on that here.  But none of them tell the reader what is going on in their souls, and that is the beauty of this story - we get to know these men, their dreams, their hopes, their crushing disappointments, their loves, and to live every day as if it was your last. The story is more about Saint-Exupéry, but not by a huge margin, than any of the others, and his life story is exceptional, his career as a pilot and writer intermingling and moving together all the time. This quote from Saint-Exupéry is what his life in this book is all about -"I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things." 

I don't fly, but have lived for 35 years with a man whose entire life has been flight. He is not a reader, but he related to some of the bits I read out to him, and maybe this is why I loved this book so much, because after all these years, I too can feel the magic of what it is like to be above the ground, flitting around the clouds, being removed from the trivia of daily life, transported in your head to another place.  There is magic in flight, and this writer and translator have captured that magic, fearlessness and sheer joy of mastering a machine in the sky.