LONDON SKIES

In 1956, Charlotte Bradbury snaps photos at a London airport, trying to get a little “transcontinental glamour by osmosis…She has no ticket—at least not one that’s still valid.” A year earlier, Stanley Smith met the lovely Alice Mortimer at a carnival, managing to introduce himself and have a lovely interaction despite his stutter and asthma. In 2010, Michael Marston is enduring a grueling separation from his wife, who’s accused him of excessive drinking and is keeping him from his young son, Ethan. A writer who focuses on aviation, specifically on plane crashes and their excavations, Michael escapes his domestic dramas to travel to Iceland and work on his new book. He’s trying to solve an Icelandic wartime mystery by locating a plane that “vanished into thick air.” One year earlier, Montague Freeman lived in his late mother’s house near Heathrow, dealing with a longstanding fear of new people and reflecting on his father’s abandonment of the family; in one of the many dizzying loops through which the author starts connecting his various characters’ lives, that father is revealed to be none other than Geoffrey Freeman, an aviation consultant who knows Michael well and who was once photographed at the same airport by Charlotte Bradbury. Tomkins then introduces readers to Frank and James Carter, a father and son also unknowingly photographed by Charlotte in 1956, shortly before they boarded a flight to Scotland and flew into a storm that would have rippling effects far into the future.  

As those effects are slowly fleshed out in each storyline, Tomkins delves deeply into a wide cast of supporting characters and rich subplots. Charlotte remains a consistent standout throughout, and the author features her in some of his most striking passages. As a former wartime nurse, her tales are filled with harrowing moments, like the extraordinarily rendered bombing of a hospital: “Did she hear the outside world, or her own damaged eardrums? Walls continued to collapse, ceilings to cave in.” Charlotte’s heartbreak is beautifully conveyed as she yearns for the lost love of her life, Viktor: “pain also compacts, taut and compressed; calcifying, ossifying, petrifying. It thins, but in doing so, hardens to dense granite.” As poetic and beautiful as Tomkins’ prose is throughout, several storylines, such as Montague’s emotional struggles or the dissolution of Michael’s marriage, feel superfluous, overlong, and too busy with detail, often bringing the story back down to earth. The connections across space and time are what really spark and make the novel fly, such as the jarring juxtaposition of a worn-down contemporary airline terminal against its jet-set promise of the 1950s. (“Decades ago, this represented the future. Modernist brick and brutal cement, the concrete planters, full of greenery and life; the planters now gone, the shiny pointed cement now dull, and the brickwork heavy with mottles and the unsightly efflorescence of ageing, like liver spots for building materials.”)