Flying to Nowhere, John Fuller (1983)

 

Finished: 13/12/24

Flying to Nowhere was a relatively short book, less than 100 pages and small, so I finished it in just a
couple of days. I don't feel like those days were wasted since this book has been on my "to read" list for a while now, but I'm glad to have gotten it over with and out of my life. This book was not good. I think the writing was really lazy and the supposed "allegory" of this book was very surface level stuff; and completely overshadowed by the sexualization of young girls! I had to look up if the author of this book had any sexual crimes in his past because the sexualization was just getting so constant, it was almost to the point of obsession.

To start off, the synopsis on the back of Flying to Nowhere states that this book is an "allegory." I do not, whatsoever, see this book as an allegory. When I think of an allegory, my mind immediately goes to the classic Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Every aspect of Plato's Allegory of the Cave relates to things that exists in the real world;  this allegory is timeless, it's over 2,000 years old and still taught in Philosophy 101. I think you could say that the ending of Flying to Nowhere is a metaphor, albeit a surface level one, but the rest of it is just uncomfortable or an average murder mystery novel. 

The one monumental scene, the end scene, takes place in the Abbot's dissection room filled with the water of the holy well. The bloated bodies of the pilgrims are floating around and some mysterious ooze is blooming through the cracks in the walls destroying all his volumes. Even though the Abbot did find the cure to death, his leather bound books turned back into animals, paper turned back into reeds, and the bloated bodies nails grew, with the imagery of the scene, it happened so fast and seemed to overtake the Abbot. That dissection room probably got so full so quickly. Vane is nowhere to be found, he probably died trying to find the end of the huge pipe from the holy well. This is juxtaposed by Tetty and Geoffrey waiting for their boat to escape the Welsh island. They're starting on a different path together, talking about their future. They're hopeful and realistic because their focus is on life and not death. I think this end scene is supposed to represent the obsession of trying to find a cure to death and the consequences of not accepting your fate. But on the other side of the coin, the rewards and hope you receive when putting your energy into focusing on your life and future, or taking a leap of faith and "flying to nowhere." 

Why I think this "allegory" is super surface level is because any sort of fantasy media can tell you that messing with death, life and time is never a good idea. It's already been explored ad nauseum. This book was written in the 80s, vampiric themes, books about immortality or bringing people/things back from the dead, reversing time, even over 40 years ago, it's all been done before. From a literary standpoint, there's no grand thought being pushed forward that already hasn't been written about.

Now on to what I'm most angry about: the sexualization of women and young girls in this novel. In the very first few pages there's a group of women mowing the grass with scythes. The only physical description of them is how big their breasts are! Later, there's an implied masturbation scene, an implied rape scene, and then one of the novices (one of the students of the Abbot) has this final test where he spends a night with a young, naked farm girl and tries to not do anything sexual to her. None of these add anything to the story, or the "allegory," they are all just filler scenes.

Before analyzing this, I want to say that this type of constant sexualization of women and young girls is, unfortunately, prevalent with male authors. It's the reason I had to stop reading GOT, it just got so gross and uncomfortable; when my brain eventually developed some more and was able to recognize that this gross sexualization was wrong, and I didn't need to subject myself to it, I stopped reading. 

That being said, on the other side of things I think there is a virtue in having to speak to yourself honestly and saying "if I keep finding problems in everything, I won't enjoy anything," which is true. There are times and places where you have to relax your beliefs a little to get through life without going crazy. -However, I can only overlook so much sexualization of women in writing before I can say: this is just lazy writing. If an author isn't able to portray women and girls in any other way besides sexual, but they are able to portray men as normal human beings with thoughts and opinions, they're not a good writer. They don't have enough of an in-depth view of the world and human interaction to be able to make a believable narrative on paper. 

I think sexualization in writing is much like Freud's work. In that, we know today that Freud was wrong on a lot of things he hypothesized and presented as truth. I'll admit that he was ahead of his time for analyzing sex and sexuality in such a conservative time period; however, the point here is that Freud's writing gives more insight to his own sexuality and fetishes than it does to anyone else's experience. Writing women and girls as only objects of sexual expression just tells me that the author's view of women is only skin-deep, which, again, not a sign of a good writer.

On to the very small paragraph of the things I liked about this book: the author is a poet and that really shined through. I am a sucker for poetic novels. I think the imagery of a holy well and a small, yellow bird do give off a sense of peace and spiritual importance. I wish there was more of these elements in the short novel.

I'm offsetting this book by reading a long one next, so the following report will be a long time in the making. Anyways, thank you for reading!