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Jul. 4th, 2023 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI just finished zooming through Elizabeth Wein's new book Stateless, which I read in about a day; it was extremely propulsive!
I feel like Elizabeth Wein these days is sort of a YA Dick Francis, but with planes instead of horses; the plot could be anything but there WILL be some early aircraft in it and we WILL all learn somethings about them. The premise here is that Our Heroine Stella North is the only girl among the various teens from various nations who have been brought together in 1937 (fraught year!) for a big promo-stunt air race promoting Peace In Europe (there isn't and there won't be!); quite early on it's clear that there is some Sabotage and Murder going on but everyone still has to fly their assigned legs and make all their publicity-stunt events while constantly frantically checking their planes and figuring out Who Amongst Them is a killer and whether said killer is operating off their own bat or as part of the broader messy political situation. (Why is Stella the only girl? Honestly I don't know, one of the main organizers in the race is a slightly clueless aviatrix who is THRILLED to support Women in the Air, but Wein has of course written plenty of important relationships between women in her previous books so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt this time.)
The other thing this reminded me quite a lot of is a Hitchcock suspense thriller -- in particular there's a big set piece later in the book where our plucky protagonists are trying to lose the Gestapo in 1937 Berlin, moving through pockets of feverish pre-war gaiety all night so they can get back safely to the airfield in the morning, that more or less played out in my mind as grayscale on 35mm.
Stella is honestly not one of Wein's most vivid protagonists and I didn't really feel that this was a very character-focused book, the cast is pretty much there to tick thematic boxes and ensure that the plot moved along. I think Wein really wanted this book to say something profound about borders and refugees and the tragedy of nationalism -- Stella and her love interest are drawn together by the fact that they're both of Russian expat descent, flying on refugee passports, and not citizens of the nations they are supposedly representing in the race -- and I am not entirely sure that she succeeds in this.
(The love interest also has Inappropriately Floppy Hair and a Brash American Drawl and unfortunately, having just rewatched Titanic last week, that did mean that I spent the whole book imagining Titanic-era Time Traveler Leo DiCaprio and laughing to myself. He also has the most incredible pile-on of dramatic backstory : his expat Russian communist father was arrested in Germany and sent to a camp, after which they fled to Spain where his mother was killed in a bombing, after which he enlisted in the Spanish Civil War and lost his leg when his plane went down, after which he was in the hospital recovering when a wounded German pilot went on a desperate hospital rampage to kill everyone who might have heard the state secrets he'd babbled in his sleep and stabbed him thirteen times with a piece of glass!! AFTER WHICH he was smuggled to France, where he somehow became the French representative in a massive cross-Europe flying race, And Now All This [gestures broadly at events of the book]
But! though I don't think this is one of Wein's greats, she did succeed in writing a very solid romantic-suspense thriller and I would love to go back in time and get Hitchcock or Curtiz or somebody to direct it. They'd probably age up the characters but that's fine, this is not the first YA book that would work perfectly well or better if everyone was an adult instead.
I feel like Elizabeth Wein these days is sort of a YA Dick Francis, but with planes instead of horses; the plot could be anything but there WILL be some early aircraft in it and we WILL all learn somethings about them. The premise here is that Our Heroine Stella North is the only girl among the various teens from various nations who have been brought together in 1937 (fraught year!) for a big promo-stunt air race promoting Peace In Europe (there isn't and there won't be!); quite early on it's clear that there is some Sabotage and Murder going on but everyone still has to fly their assigned legs and make all their publicity-stunt events while constantly frantically checking their planes and figuring out Who Amongst Them is a killer and whether said killer is operating off their own bat or as part of the broader messy political situation. (Why is Stella the only girl? Honestly I don't know, one of the main organizers in the race is a slightly clueless aviatrix who is THRILLED to support Women in the Air, but Wein has of course written plenty of important relationships between women in her previous books so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt this time.)
The other thing this reminded me quite a lot of is a Hitchcock suspense thriller -- in particular there's a big set piece later in the book where our plucky protagonists are trying to lose the Gestapo in 1937 Berlin, moving through pockets of feverish pre-war gaiety all night so they can get back safely to the airfield in the morning, that more or less played out in my mind as grayscale on 35mm.
Stella is honestly not one of Wein's most vivid protagonists and I didn't really feel that this was a very character-focused book, the cast is pretty much there to tick thematic boxes and ensure that the plot moved along. I think Wein really wanted this book to say something profound about borders and refugees and the tragedy of nationalism -- Stella and her love interest are drawn together by the fact that they're both of Russian expat descent, flying on refugee passports, and not citizens of the nations they are supposedly representing in the race -- and I am not entirely sure that she succeeds in this.
(The love interest also has Inappropriately Floppy Hair and a Brash American Drawl and unfortunately, having just rewatched Titanic last week, that did mean that I spent the whole book imagining Titanic-era Time Traveler Leo DiCaprio and laughing to myself. He also has the most incredible pile-on of dramatic backstory : his expat Russian communist father was arrested in Germany and sent to a camp, after which they fled to Spain where his mother was killed in a bombing, after which he enlisted in the Spanish Civil War and lost his leg when his plane went down, after which he was in the hospital recovering when a wounded German pilot went on a desperate hospital rampage to kill everyone who might have heard the state secrets he'd babbled in his sleep and stabbed him thirteen times with a piece of glass!! AFTER WHICH he was smuggled to France, where he somehow became the French representative in a massive cross-Europe flying race, And Now All This [gestures broadly at events of the book]
But! though I don't think this is one of Wein's greats, she did succeed in writing a very solid romantic-suspense thriller and I would love to go back in time and get Hitchcock or Curtiz or somebody to direct it. They'd probably age up the characters but that's fine, this is not the first YA book that would work perfectly well or better if everyone was an adult instead.
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Date: 2023-07-04 06:47 pm (UTC)That is honestly a problem I have with so many YA books nowadays.
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Date: 2023-07-04 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-04 08:53 pm (UTC)My read on "why is Stella the only girl" is that the other nations wanted their official air race representative to be a boy, which would be a perfectly adequate explanation if it was actually presented in the narrative rather than something I came up with on my own. Stella and Lady Frith could commiserate about it perhaps! Another example of the difficulties facing women pilots, and a moment when we could learn something about their relationship, which is frustratingly vague.
In general, I thought the book was full of missed opportunities like this. As you say, Stateless definitely wants to say something about refugees and borders and the tragedy of nationalism, but it never quite lands. Sometimes it's a little too on the nose, like the bit where Stella's flying over the old trench lines and more or less explains The Tragedy of War for us, and other times the intended beats just don't hit like it should because the character work is just not strong enough to support it.
Stella is not particularly vivid, and most of the other flyers are barely sketched in. About halfway through the book I gave up on sorting out everyone but our main guys. We've got Stella and Sebastian and Tony and Pim, and everyone else is just sort of a youthful flying haze! Admittedly twelve flyers is a LOT of flyers, but school story authors carry off casts of this size with aplomb all the time, so it could have been done.
And because so many of the characters are ciphers, the heart-warming moment where they all come together to protect Tony and then Sebastian is just not that heart-warming. Friendship transcending nationalism can't bear any thematic weight if there's no substance to the friendship because the individual friends are barely more than names. Most of the characters end up defined by their nationalities, which goes completely against the theme, but there's nothing else there to hang onto.
Having said all that, it is a page-turner once the action kicks into gear. (It does take a while before that happens, though.) Hitchcock would have done an amazing job directing that nocturnal flight through the panicked gaiety of pre-war Hamburg.
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Date: 2023-07-04 10:33 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's puzzling to me because I know Wein can write strong and compelling voice and it seems like this time she was just ... distracted? Stella and the rest have got to move briskly through the plot and they occasionally get a Character Trait (Tony is Direct! Stella Cares About Birds!) but nothing that they say or do is ever really anything that anybody else might not say or do in their situation, but the situation is dramatic and that pulls everything along. (Even their romance, or perhaps especially their romance, is really just like 'gosh did you notice ... we're narrative parallels?!') But it really does sabotage any message she wants the book to have, because all of Stella's inner monologues on the subject just feel like Wein's monologues rather than something that genuinely arises from the character.
Oh, one other thing I did like though is the way that the book is constantly paying attention to what language everyone is speaking, and who can communicate with whom, and the ways that does and doesn't limit communication. Fun to have the Greek and Polish kids attempting to find a common language and ending up with Russian!
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Date: 2023-07-05 12:02 am (UTC)And also one feels that surely France could find a young pilot who actually speaks French to represent La France in this highly publicized international air race.
Coming to this book directly off Lion Hunters gave me such whiplash. In Lion Hunters all the characters are so compelling! And the themes cover some similar territory about national identity and borders and exile, but it's developed in a natural and understated way, so you never have that feeling you have here that the characters' thoughts are in fact simply Wein's monologues. What happened?
Haha YES I did laugh when literally their romance is "She had a Nansen passport... he had a Nansen passport... Can I make it any more obvious?" They're narrative parallels! How can they help but fall in love! And anyway, the only other contender is Sebastian, who starts the book as a Nazi Luftwaffe pilot, and even though by the end of the book he is of course a fugitive fleeing the Nazis, I can see why Wein didn't want to go there. So it has to be Tony.
I did enjoy the attention to Who Speaks Which Language, too. Definitely one of the aspects that made me feel there's a good book in here struggling to get out.
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Date: 2023-07-06 02:25 am (UTC)But yes, I agree that if Stella had had a bit more backstory whump of her own, it would have balanced out better. She did have a fair bit that took place when she was three! But Tony's is spread over so MUCH of his life -- so many incidents! in so many countries! -- and she has to relate to it with "yes, I remember when I was three..." I did very much enjoy their battle couple rapport, but it would have been nice if they were both a little less YA about it all.
I did think she did REMARKABLY well with Sebastian at making him sympathetic without being an apologist about it at all. A tricky line to walk!
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Date: 2023-07-06 03:53 pm (UTC)I also wanted Stella to, like, think about her whump more? Not that she needs to be angsting about it all the time, but it also felt surprising when she's bonding with Tony over her horrible trauma when she's three, and this is the first time we learn that she actually remembers it.
Yes, I really thought Sebastian was the only one of the young flyers who really became a three-dimensional person, perhaps because that's the only way to write a sympathetic Luftwaffe pilot in 1937 without being an apologist about it. Whereas the older flyers all felt like real people! (Well, except the Italian guy, but we barely saw him.) More evidence perhaps that the book would have been better released from the ironclad expectations of modern YA?
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Date: 2023-07-04 10:52 pm (UTC)I can absolutely see that.
I commend to your attention Q Planes (1939), which is the weirdest of the British pre-war espionage comedy-thrillers I have encountered hands down; it's actually spy-fi, with international villains and mysteriously disappearing top-secret test flights and a death ray, but also a nice assortment of vintage aircraft. Laurence Olivier as one of the test pilots, Valerie Hobson as the plucky reporter undercover at the airfield, Ralph Richardson as her brother the whimsical intelligence agent never seen without his bowler hat or his umbrella even when he's cooking Italian. I'm very fond of it. It's nuts.
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Date: 2023-07-05 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-05 03:22 am (UTC)I watched it on the Criterion Channel, which is a hilarious imprimatur of class under the circumstances, but if you don't mind the runtime being fast by five minutes, it seems plentifully available on the Internet Archive/YouTube!
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Date: 2023-07-05 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-05 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-05 12:55 pm (UTC)(I giggled. Perhaps one should not giggle about stabbing, but this one did.)
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Date: 2023-07-10 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-11 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-06 02:20 am (UTC)However, I also agree that it would've been better if it weren't YA, and I spent the whole book sort of wishing it wasn't. I don't think the characters necessarily needed to be aged up, though, just the writing style. One can (or at least, one used to be able to) write about 19-year-olds for an adult audience! And I think Stella's voice in particular would have felt infinitely more grounded (as it were) if Wein had allowed herself to really inhabit the specificity of the character and her background and her relationships to a greater degree. Instead, it felt like other characters got to have the specificity of their background, and the setting and all its tangled politics had enormous specificity, but Stella got sanded down into Plucky First-Person YA Heroine at a lot of turns. She was still fun, and her story was still fun, but it would've been even more fun with more individual edges.
[Edit: Also, I'm just now realizing that there was unremarkably good weather EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE BOOK. No matter what season they pick, this seems unlikely!]
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Date: 2023-07-06 03:33 am (UTC)YOU ARE SO RIGHT about the weather, I hadn't even noticed! Damn, they are all SO lucky that a bad storm didn't hit the day they were supposed to leave Berlin or they'd all be Extremely Doomed.
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Date: 2023-07-06 05:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-06 03:56 pm (UTC)To be fair, I didn't notice till you pointed it out, so maybe Wein figured the non-pilot audience would mostly be unbothered. But now that you've mentioned it, it DOES feel like an oversight.
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Date: 2023-07-06 04:11 pm (UTC)It was even more egregious in The Enigma Game because the plucky heroine was a 15-year-old with no military clearance at all, and the story kept having to twist itself into pretzels to get her into the relevant scenes. Stella at least has good reason to be everywhere that she is!
Anyway, you'd think after a smash hit like Code Name Verity, the editors would let Wein break the YA Rules if she wants to. But then who understands the ways of publishers...
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Date: 2023-07-08 07:06 pm (UTC)I think I'd rather reread Steel Blues (Melissa Scott and Jo Graham), also about an US air race set in 1931. Adults, most still dealing with the aftermath of WWI and now the Great Depression, but with magic.
The planes in Stateless are biplanes? Huh. I guess Wein wanted solo-piloted planes, that are cheaper and available? Never mind. I don't really need to know.
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Date: 2023-07-10 08:05 pm (UTC)The racers are specifically amateur youths here -- or, well, I don't know how strict the "amateur" qualification is, since at least one is an active member of their country's military, but it's billed as The Olympics Of The Air and the pilots applied by being plucky young (preferably multilingual) youths writing an essay about how much they value peace in Europe, and stuff. So, yeah, I think the idea is that they're flying cheaper solo-pilot planes that aren't necessarily cutting-edge.