Books

Something in the air – Book Review


A journey through the heyday of the hot-air balloon illustrates how it helped civilisation rise on drafts of discovery, romance and adventure.

Something can not happen, but feel as if it is. You are sitting in a train and think the train is moving when, in fact, it’s the train on the next platform. When Richard Holmes was four years old, his uncle, an RAF pilot, gave him a helium balloon from the local fete, which he tied to Holmes’ shirt button. They stood on a hilltop overlooking the Norfolk countryside, the balloon tugging at his shirt button, and when Holmes looked to the sky, he had the sudden, distinct feeling of falling – upwards!

A lifetime later, that balloon still tugs at his shirt button, and this wonderful study of ballooning through the modern era is the outcome of its insistence.

Holmes’ works include such brilliant studies as Footsteps – a modern masterpiece – Sidetracks and, most recently, The Age of Wonder. He brings to his non-fiction writing a highly tuned blend of imagination and scholarship (with more than a dash of whimsy and the elegiac) that gives it a sort of poetic resonance, with strong images that linger long after the book is finished.

In Footsteps, after retracing the path R.L. Stevenson and his donkey took through the Cevennes mountains (which became Stevenson’s book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes), Holmes waits at the end of the last day of his journey at a bridge he thinks Stevenson must have crossed, fully expecting to see his subject emerge from the mists of time. By sunset, Holmes looks upstream and sees the old, disused bridge Stevenson would have crossed. Such, Holmes says with an aptness of metaphor typical of his writing, is the nature of biography.

The images in Falling Upwards are similarly resonant, and not just the opening section with the helium-filled balloon. In fact, through the ages the balloon emerges almost as a sort of Everyman character from a picaresque novel – one of those characters who are different things to different times; all poignant fragility one minute and H.G. Wellsian spectre the next; quixotic adventurer, epic explorer, all gravitas and daring, setting out for uncharted worlds in one age, and a dandy who discovers his serious side in another.

So, while the balloon exploits he describes are vivid and actual, the balloon itself is something of a metaphor, emblematic of what Holmes calls ”the spirit of discovery”. In this sense, Falling Upwards continues on with preoccupations in The Age of Wonder – which touched briefly on ballooning, the Montgolfier brothers in particular. By coincidence, Julian Barnes’ recent memoir, Levels of Life, was in part a history of ballooning, used as a metaphor for grief.

Holmes’ book runs from the late 18th century to the beginning of the 20th, which was the end of the great age of ballooning. And, of course, there are characters aplenty. There is Major Money, who went up in a balloon for charity in 1789, was swept out to sea and rescued on the brink of death, and became the pride of East Anglia as one of the first of the hot-air celebrities. Fate was not so kind to Father Adelir Antonio de Carli who, in 2008, went up with 1000 small balloons in Brazil and never came back. In revolutionary France, Sophie Blanchard, whom Napoleon appointed his official aeronaut, took to the Parisian skies in a shallow, gondola-like basket that looked like something out of Madame Recamier’s salon.

The balloons themselves also became famous, such as Le Geant (one of the original champagne tourist flights), which was more than ably publicised by French photographer Nadar. And, often as not, the memoirs of the balloonists, often achieving popular and critical success, make haunting reading, especially accounts of Charles Green’s Nassau flight in 1836, floating over the glowing industrial inferno of Liege at night with the sounds of machinery and workers rising from the earth below.

Then there are the scientific advances, such as the flight of the Mammoth in 1862, which took meteorologist James Glaisher 11 kilometres up (without oxygen), rendering him insensible and near death. But he was coolly recording his observations until he passed out and, during successive flights, played a key role in developing the new science. Literature and ballooning, from Mary Shelley to Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, are also incorporated, as well as the balloon in time of war, where it had some of its finest moments, as in the American Civil War, in which balloons were used to great effect by the Union army to observe Confederate troop movements.

One of the most engrossing chapters in the book, and possibly ballooning’s finest hour, was its role in breaking the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. It was, as Holmes points out, history’s first airlift; Le Geant, among other balloons, were pressed back into service to carry thousands upon thousands of letters and official government communiques from the besieged City to the outside world.

It was the tragic failure of Swedish explorer Salomon Andree to reach the Arctic pole by balloon (his party perished in the snow) that, more or less, officially marked the end of the age of the balloon, with the aeroplane, by then, having claimed the skies. And it is here that Holmes’ writing takes on an elegiac, even late-Victorian tone. But even as we bid farewell to Mr Balloon, the spirit of discovery that attended its rise and fall, as this book demonstrates, lingers on, as does the childlike capacity for wonder that leaves us imagining that you actually could fall – upwards.

Buy Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air on Amazon

FALLING UPWARDS Richard Holmes HarperCollins, 488pp

via – Brisbane Times.