The Airways

by Jennifer Mills

I had a body once before. I didn't always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it.

I knew better than to wish for this.

This is the story of Yun. It's the story of Adam.
Two young people. A familiar chase.

But this is not a love story.
It's a story of revenge, transformation, survival.

Feel something, the body commands. Feel this.
But it's a phantom . . . I go untouched.

They want their body back.

Who are we, if we lose hold of the body?
What might we become?

The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death.

A powerful, inventive, and immersive novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.

Praise for The Airways:
'Sensational. The Airways is an intricate, existential wonder - Mills' ability to inhabit boundlessness is astonishing. A deeply empathetic genius flows through these pages.' - Josephine Rowe

'A haunting and intimate examination of violence, alienation, dislocation and possession, and the need to reckon with the past. The Airways is a masterful novel: Mills writes prose of rare distinction.' - Julie Koh

Genres: Fiction, Audiobook, Horror, Ghosts, China, Literary Fiction, Australia

384 pages, Paperback

Published July 27, 2021

About the author

Jennifer Mills is the author of five books: the novels The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018; shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award for Literature and the 2019 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel), Gone (2011), and The Diamond Anchor (2009), and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (2012). In 2012 Mills was named a Best Young Australian Novelist by the Sydney Morning Herald and in 2014 was awarded the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship from the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Mills lives on Kaurna Yerta.

Reviews

[Krystal · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a story about a ghost seeking revenge.

You would think it would be a fantastic horror story but the real horror is the pain of reading this book.

'Minds are illegible; they read the body. Wet cold prickles under the back, the shirt too thin. Bacteria hitches a ride in the air, clings to a hair in the nostril. They move, are moved, into these discomforts, go where there are openings. (Do they open things?) The body coughs, its whole length poised and racking. The eyes leave the stars and return; the body sits up, relaxes. The joint held aloft. They are in the fingers where the burn will meet the skin. In sweet smoke.'

If you appreciate that kind of writing, congratulations. You did what I could not. Have fun with this book which is full of passsages like this. You will love it.

When did 'brilliant literature' become synonymous with 'convoluted writing that goes out of its way to say everything except what it actually needs to say'? It all seems so pretentious to me. Just tell the freaking story please.

I LOVE ghost stories. THIS STORY IS ABOUT A VENGEFUL GHOST POSSESSING PEOPLE ON ITS WAY TO FIND THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR ITS DEMISE. It talks about themes like consent and identity and works its way into the mind of a man who thinks he's good but is actually a scumbag and it is actually full of really fascinating ideas. There was so much here to unpack and it could have been a really brilliant, entertaining story.

But, NO.

It decides instead to tell its fantastic story through long, convoluted passages and choppy imagery that remind me of all those times I filled my essays with pointless crap just to make the word count.

Also, I appreciate the importance pronouns have in helping us defining ourselves but unfortunately in the context of this book, all of the 'they' references just made an already-complicated writing style even harder to untangle. I was so lost.

This one was just not for me, folks.

I give full props to the story - the alternating chapters give us Adam's story and 'Their' story, but unfortunately They and Adam both do really, really boring things with their time so if you're not someone who enjoys books that just languish over describing boring things in a twisted manner then you will likely find yourself as frustrated as I was.

If you enjoy unravelling long, confusing passages to tease out what they're trying to say, you'll be all over this. This is for the language lovers; the people who are happy to forfeit action for pretty words. There are some really interesting themes and plenty of symbolism but if you're after a meaty story that really delves into these things you will be disappointed.

Honestly I was so excited to read this story and that just makes it all the more disappointing for me.

I hope others will appreciate it more than I did.

With thanks to Macmillan for a copy.

[PattyMacDotComma]

I read a little of this, but the writing style felt too contrived. I enjoy poetry and lyrical writing when it flows. Some readers may love the book - it's just not for me. Such a pity when that happens.

[joshua sorensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

all ghost stories are about trauma; trauma makes ghosts of all

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Airways is a book that rewards patience and some re-reading.  The reward is that the novel triggers some very interesting ideas.

This is the blurb:

I had a body once before. I didn't always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it.

I knew better than to wish for this.

This is the story of Yun. It's the story of Adam.
Two young people. A familiar chase.

But this is not a love story.
It's a story of revenge, transformation, survival.

Feel something, the body commands. Feel this.
But it's a phantom . . . I go untouched.

They want their body back.

Who are we, if we lose hold of the body?
What might we become?

The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death.

It's only fair to warn you, however, that in the beginning, I could not make sense of it.  I read two chapters at bedtime, put it aside and read something less challenging, and started again in the morning.  Trusting this author whose work I've admired since I read Gone in 2011, I just kept reading and slowly the dual narratives came together to form an intriguing whole.

I hesitate to declare Adam the central character even though the narrative about his physical and mental states in Sydney and Beijing is central to the story.  That's because another narrative that runs alongside Adam's, features a presence in pursuit of him.  They are certainly not a 'character'. This presence is too corporeal to be called a ghost, too diffused to be nameable, and too nonspecific to have a gendered pronoun or one that's singular or plural. The reader learns that we do not need to know this but that we cannot assume that they are or were a non-binary human or even living or dead.

This presence moves among the people who cross their paths, entering strangers' bodies in various ways and gradually learning to master them in some ways, at the very least making them feel uneasy or dizzy without knowing why.  Are they benign?  It seems not.  Some kind of vengeance is in play.

The sequences in Beijing are superbly claustrophobic.  The air pollution we hear about is pervasive: it clings to skin and eyes and throat and airways and there is no escape from it.  Adam's physical vulnerability is exacerbated by his inability to learn even rudimentary Chinese; it makes him dependent on others.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/06/t...

[Jillwilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this novel because I have spent a bit of time in Beijing where part of the narrative is set. At times when I have been in China, I’ve thought about my own airways – the grit from coal-fired power stations seemed to pervade the cities there in winter and always left my eyes feeling scratchy. More recently, I know that locals have resorted to a daily reading of the air quality to work out whether it’s safe to go outside. So a novel that focuses on the dangers of the air around us is really pertinent. And now that we are dealing with a pandemic – there are even more immediate challenges in the air around us. There is a scene early in the book where one of the novel’s protagonists, Adam, is on a crowded train in Beijing, and a man near him “hoick[s] wet phlegm” in the back of his throat. Adam wonders “how long it would take for a person to come into contact with every other person in the city” and “exchange” their viruses and spores. “It would be easy for an epidemic to spread”, he concludes. But this book was written in 2015 – it’s eerily prescient.

The Airways is made up of three interconnected narratives. Two of them are written in the third-person. Adam lives with, and watches, his more progressive housemates: Kate, Marita, and Yun. Adam feels drawn to the non-binary Yun, a student studying virology and microbiology, to the point where he imagines ‘clim[bing] inside them, and exchang[ing] himself’. He creeps into Yun’s room at night time and watches them sleep. [As Yun is non-binary “they/them” is used throughout in reference to Yun. I will take a while to get used to the dissonance this creates – when I encounter this usage in novels – it’s jarring.]

A small part of the novel is told from Yun’s point of view but they are murdered – and so the third narrative is through a kind of spirit which emerges from the murder and moves through the city looking for bodies to inhabit. Once again, I was reminded of David McRobbie’s story in This Book Is Haunted where a group of ghosts hover over the body of a person who is near death - waiting to slip into the body and reanimate themselves. It’s a little bit more fun than ‘The Airways’. The spirit is a powerful character in this novel, moving from person to person restlessly in search of one specific person – which might be the murderer.

I sound unsure about that – and that is no accident. In this novel, things are very hard to pin down – everything feels tenuous, liminal, vulnerable. Here’s a quote from a reviewer: “The most engaging narrative, however, is the one that opens the novel. After the catalysing moment of violence, this account follows the consciousness that springs from ‘a swarm of anger, a brief blur of pollinating fury’ as ‘unremembered, unbodied, the I becomes they’. Somehow, ‘they’ have flickered back into existence in an entirely new form. Told mostly in the third-person plural present, this immersive narrative shimmers with energy as they travel through the air and from body to body, evolving with every transition.” (https://issuu.com/australianbookrevie...)

Fives years after the initial scenes in Sydney, Adam is in Beijing working for a mysterious start-up business – selling ‘bespoke global brand solutions’. "After Sydney, every other climate was an affront. [...] The unrelenting pleasantness erased hostilities. Even when bushfire smoke had stretched to fill and dim the sun, it had always brought beautiful dusks and dawns with it, like offerings. Catastrophe could not be believed in. Nothing had prepared him for Beijing's sky, for the way it could turn against life.”

Everything is ambiguous and hard to negotiate – whether it is the subway, the ever-changing physical landscape or the slight relationships he is able to form as an ex-pat. Mills does a good job of describing the speed of change in this city, the weight of numbers, the anonymity and loneliness of a person who does not speak even a vestige of the language, the temporariness of living there as an outsider.

Nothing is as it seems. And yet Adam’s life was a bit like that in Sydney as well– he is an outsider, disconnected from his own thoughts and motivations as much as he is disconnected from the people he know. He thinks of himself as a “good guy” but most of the things he does seem creepy or at the very least a little strange. “This is a very interior novel, mostly unfolding inside the heads of its distant, ferociously observant narrators, both of them peripheral outsiders. Entitled Adam consistently misreads signals and situations, often wilfully. He repeatedly tells himself, in a tone even he doesn’t seem to believe, that he is a “good guy” and has “done nothing wrong”.” (https://indaily.com.au/inreview/books...)

And sitting alongside is the narrative of the opportunistic spirit as it slips inside one body then the next – through bodily weaknesses – a cough, a yawn, a cut. “They sit within each body, with a fresh awareness of all of its energies and sensations: from the dull ache of a blister to the coiled restlessness of a teenage boy, to pricklings of desire, cherished bruisings, cricked necks, racing hearts and floodings of relief.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...)

I did not enjoy reading this book. Several reviewers have made a case for persevering, perhaps even re-reading but I’m not convinced. I think it’s quite clever – but annoying. One reviewer said (and I think this is true: “Perhaps because the narrators are deliberately opaque even to themselves, this is a novel that holds the reader at a distance.” (https://indaily.com.au/inreview/books...) And another: “Like the Miles Franklin short-listed Dyschronia, The Airways achieves its uncanny atmosphere by obscuring or suspending plot details. Likewise important events are de-emphasised and occur in ellipsis or fragment. The result is that the climactic moments – Yun’s murder, Adam’s transgressions – occur off the page or in high-register poetic abstraction.” (https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...)

I just found it hard work. Here’s Declan Fry writing about this novel: “The Airways’ evocations of dislocation and dissociation, rigged to accommodate the potential of some vague, indefinable sense of significance, feel self-conscious and freighted. Its hyper-awareness and surround-sound perception have the reclusive compulsivity of Emily Dickinson: the wider world becomes a hermetic box, a sensorium of smells and sounds, claustrophobic as the fly’s buzz. This circuitry is less successful than exhausting; a truth so slant it threatens to topple all readerly investment. Everything seems tricked-out, called upon to carry multiple resonances. But then anything kept vague enough can: and The Airways is nothing if not vague.” (https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/c...)

[The Honest Book Reviewer · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not find my way to engage with this novel. I really tried. Really tried. But the writing in half the chapters is so jarring, it's difficult to read, and I found it to be a bit pretentious, if I'm honest. It felt like an author trying too hard to be poetic, and if all came across as forced.

For the other chapters, where we have Adam's POV, this felt like wading through tedium to find the small nuggets that made each chapter that tiny bit worthwhile. And, as a reader, if I'm forced to do that, then this is not the book for me. I definitely found this to be a waste of time to read. I read it because it's on the Miles Franklin Literary Award long list. It certainly would not be my choice as winner.

This is meant to be a ghost story. A story of revenge. In a way it is - but you need to decipher the language to notice. Most of this story follows Adam, as he navigates life in Sydney and Beijing. This novel meanders along with Adam's life, and I felt like I was reading Adam's boring travelogue at times. The author is trying to show Adam is uncomfortable with his surroundings and on edge. Sure, we see that, but it's provided in too much detail. There are too many moments when the story drags.

There is definitely something odd about Adam, it's easy to spot. He has an obsessive-stalker vibe going on, and his obsession with Yun (who is non-binary) is the focus of much of the Sydney chapters. A tragic event transpires and Adam refocuses his life to shift to Beijing. Through all his chapters, we're told he's a good guy. The character provides that affirmation. The twist, though it's not really a twist, is that he's not a good guy. And, while in Beijing, he starts to unravel as he's haunted by Yun. Though, is he haunted be memories, or by a spirit? Maybe that's one of the questions in this book.

If written more cleanly, if actually providing us with a bit of tension or suspense rather than too many tedious details, this may have been a better ghost story, or story of revenge. As it stands, I would not encourage people to spend money on this book.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s literary fiction then there’s whatever this is. I had no idea what was going on basically the whole way through the book and not in an immersive way (LOTE by Shola von Reinhold does this very well) - if I had cared more about the characters or if the mystery had been made to feel worth unravelling I might have felt more compelled to try to work out what was going on. I listened to the audiobook version via my library (boy am I glad I did not spend money on this book!) and the narrator’s voice also failed to make the story sound more interesting, but I blame the writing rather than the actor. Some points given for some of the descriptive passages I guess, but overall this book misses the mark, in my opinion, and I’m glad I’m done with it.

[Gavan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah, nah. Almost gave up after 50 pages but ploughed on. Almost gave up at 100 pages, but ploughed on hoping it would improve - which it did around pages 150 to 250, but then nothing else happened of any note for the last 100 pages ... Great concept & would have made for a very good novella, but this just dragged on & on. A combination of 3 stories. In the first, Adam was in Sydney & very weird. In the second, he was in Beijing & got sick & seemed to perpetually wander around the city - this thread was insanely tedious with no meaningful character/plot development whatsoever that I could find. In the third, was the ghost (or what I thought was several ghosts by the use of "they/them", but finally realised was a singular ghost of one of Adam's Sydney flatmates) trying to find Adam - again, this thread just dragged on & on.

[Declan Fry]

Occasionally a book arrives that is so strange, so obscure, so crouched and brooding and – in the final analysis – mystifying, that you cannot begin to know what to make of it. Exhibit A: Jennifer Mills’ The Airways.

Some of my bafflement lies, I think, in Mills’ storytelling. For Mills, sensory apprehension becomes the novel itself. Her mode is like the anti-Herzog: recall how the physical perceptions of Saul Bellow’s titular protagonist are cordoned off as intermissions in his primary journey, a remembrance of things past, the psychological communion with exes, friends, family and nemeses. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves takes a similar approach. These narratives are less interested in where the characters might physically be travelling than in where their mental associations take them. The Airways is unusual in being hyper-focused on the journeys of its two main characters.

Greek–Australian Adam, 27, lives aimlessly in Beijing. He is afflicted by a mysterious illness, or sense of haunting. Four years earlier, we learn, he (seemingly) assaulted a non-binary student, Yun, with whom he lived in Sydney. Chapters alternate between Adam’s life in Sydney leading up to the event and his present in Beijing, alongside Yun’s disembodied voice, which takes possession of various bodies in its journey to seek out Adam.

In the chapters from Yun’s perspective, every aberration in the atmosphere is noticed, every mote and waver. If a dog barks, a paragraph or two can be profitably spent describing it. The effect is comparable to Alain Robbe-Grillet; but whereas Robbe-Grillet was programmatic and architectural, concerned to avoid anything conspicuously “literary” in the Balzac/Stendhal sense, Mills is more prose-poetic, intensely focused on the sensory. Yun’s name, homophonic in Chinese with “transport”, recalls their movement from body to body, as well as clouds, those seemingly solid yet vaporous substances – or another uncertain substance: fate. They are a “phoretic organism” employing “human forms for strategic dispersal, seeking out the rare host in which they might transform”.

Adam’s narrative, too, is microfocused. We are told he wears lambskin (fake), and is haunted by visions of a fox, suggesting “an animal innocence, hardly aware of itself as predator, as prey”. He considers himself a “good guy”, though this will change in Beijing as he becomes increasingly haunted, marked by “a wound that ached and would not close”. Christian imagery recurs: visions of the underworld via Beijing’s guijie (Ghost Street); a train in which he is possessed by Yun, “a looping creature, a curved snake circling back into itself”; Adam/Yun’s longing to “bite into a crisp apple”; even a playful reference to “Little Apple”, the Chinese pop song that went viral in 2014; the lambskin; and, of course, his name.

Read on: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/c...

[Fiona Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply disturbing

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting idea but a slow read

[Beth · Rating 1 out of 5]

This review is going to be harsh, but I’ve just finished reading and I’m confused and annoyed by the whole thing. I’m all for character driven/introspective books that don’t need action, but this book wasn’t that. Trying to get a picture of the story and the characters through the onslaught of words was near impossible, and honestly made this book a slog to get through.

I had two main issues with the book.

1. Some reviews describe the writing as poetic but mostly I found it dense paragraphs of minutely described details and sentences full of adjectives that never really painted a picture. It became incredibly repetitive, endless descriptions of bodies and pain and blood and tendons, but instead of differentiating people and giving lots of snapshots into different lives, it somehow made every person the same. Plus the fact that almost everything was described negatively, with no human the ghost inhabiting feeling joy or happiness or health, each description had a dull drudgery to it, that made me feel annoyed when I reached yet another chapter from their perspective.

2. the characters were boring. The premise of a vengeful ghost hunting the person who harmed them is great. The structure of the book using three pov- the ghost, the past tense and the present tense was also great. The problem is that Adam, and sort of Yun though we never actually get to know them at all, is incredibly boring. He has a boring life, does boring things and thinks boring thoughts. Perhaps that was the point? That he was just an average guy? The flashback narration tells us that he’s a good guy, he thinks he’s a good guy, but as the story progresses we find out that he’s actually not a great guy, and is kind of weird and creepy. I think. Because once again, wading through the long, syrupy, over indulged prose to actually know anything was pretty impossible. So mostly I just think he was a boring guy who did some creepy things.

Other reviewers who gave it a similar rating to me seemed to have picked up more in their reading of it, themes of consent, violence, the state of the world and about Adam’s character. I mostly just feel deeply confused.

Spoilers: for example, did Adam kill Yun? I’m fine with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators, but personally I didn’t feel like there was all that much in the entire book pointing to this. If anything, I took that Yun woke up to find Adam in their room, and left the house which led to their murder, but since there was basically no description of what happened or their relationship outside of Adams pov, how do we know? That theory is based off like three sentences in the final pages.

That’s another thing, everyone really seemed to not like Adam, or be creeped out by him, but was that the possession doing that or could everyone see he was a weird and creepy guy? Yun seemed to hate that Adam watched them, but the reader doesn’t get to know this until the final pages because there’s almost no interaction between the characters, so we just need to infer Yun is uncomfortable through our knowledge that Adam crosses boundaries and creeps on them, without them saying anything at all.

I think that these little secrets the author kept from the reader are another thing that let the book down. You could guess pretty early on that Yun is the ghost and that Adam is possessed but because nothing is ever confirmed until the very end pages, the reader is always steps behind. It wouldn’t have made it less atmospheric or thrilling to be clear with what was happening, and actually would have helped the story progress and let the characters have some genuine feelings of their own instead of just rambling reflections about nothing much.

Overall, I thought that if this had been edited down and cleaned up it would have made a good short story. But there just wasn’t enough there for over 300 pages, and the characters weren’t engaging enough to carry the minimal plot there was.

[Dani Ringrose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeah, this was as hard to get into as others have warned, but I was still intrigued enough to finish it. Once I figured out that the “they” in the ghost passages were a gender-neutral Yun, it made it a hell of a lot easier to understand, and it helped when they turned from experimental poetry into prose passages. The concept is unsettling, and the body horror in this is top shelf. But I still didn’t fully get into it, but I’m sure I’ll keep thinking about this for a while - which is what a good book should do, I suppose. Worth the price of admission for the passage below.
“Each body speaks in its own cadence, with its own accent, in unique patterns of heat and energy and motion, desire and entanglement, attention and aversion and devotion. Each its own playground and prison. A boy asleep in sugar dreams, teenage limbs swinging from handrails; a man with a warm pie in a bag on his lap, the scent of it dancing in its stomach; a woman staring at a crossword, pen in the mouth, the taste of ink. Noise in headphones, and the rush of air from an open window. The flush of being drunk in the afternoon. Sour sweat. A ball under one big arm. Captive muscle bursting, humid breath. The spell of Deaf hands singing to each other. The bodies keep swinging open, and they search through, more deliberate than before. Looking for the open host, the safe harbour.”

[Nicki Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me several chapters to get into The Airways. I started it late one night and I think my brain was not awake enough to process it at first. When I came back to it the following evening, I started to get into the story and came to appreciate its clever style and interesting premise, which dwelt on themes of self-identity and personal agency, as well as the balance of life and death. It was intriguing, thought-provoking and well-written; however, when I turned the final page, I did wish I could have connected with the piece on more of an emotional level too, as my appreciate for it was mainly intellectual and I'd never come to care deeply for either of the main characters. Nonetheless, it is a book I am glad I had the opportunity to read and I would recommend it for fans of literary fiction looking for something with a fresh take on familiar themes. I am giving it four stars.

I received this book as a free ARC from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to rate as an audiobook because it's quite ethereal and I ended up just letting parts of it wash over me, without following the story too closely. It's a story that doesn't bring you close into it because of the multitude of ghostly voices that put in an appearance here and there. Often there's a feeling that the main character may be one of them but then something pulls you out of that train of thought.
For a book that has a horror element, I never felt that horrified nor did I really feel any suspense.
It's enjoyable but because of the ethereal writing style it may not be one that sits in my memory for very long.

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 3 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

[Kathryn O'Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Airways was... strange.

Told from two perspectives, the reader is taken on a journey from Sydney to Beijing in a bizarre cat-and-mouse that reminded me of both Behind Her Eyes and The Yellow Wallpaper.

If you can persevere with the initial discomfort of the disembodied narration and the incredible tension built by Mills's prose, the conclusion is quite satisfying.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was creepy and chilling - being in the perspective of someone who's done something wrong. I wanted revenge - but I got something a little stranger than that.

[Rebecca Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

[Wendy · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

So great but also too depressing

[Kate Walton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't understand what was going on for 95% of the book. Too vague.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

unfortunately by the time i understood what was going on, i was beyond caring -i think the premise was good but maybe some of the poetic language was lost on me and there was too much to piece together and too frequent POV changes - it was almost a DNF

[Jehlish]

I don't love this book, but this passage about Sydney was pretty amazing:

"After Sydney, every other climate was an affront. [...] The unrelenting pleasantness erased hostilities. Even when bushfire smoke had stretched to fill and dim the sun, it had always brought beautiful dusks and dawns with it, like offerings. Catastrophe could not be believed in. Nothing had prepared him for Beijing's sky, for the way it could turn against life."

Update after finishing:
A natural poet´s novel. Not much narrative drive but highly original language and imagery. Many great individual lines or passages. A strong final few sections. Somewhat manages the trick of sustaining reader engagement with an unappealing protagonist, though it´s certainly not a book that flies.

[Marles Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Airways” is unlike other books. And to review it is in a similar nature, because it is the only way to allow thoughts to come to the surface after reading it. The opportunity to become close to the characters, to get to know them emotionally is minimal. You get to know them through their physicality, their presence, where they are and about the very sensory functions that keep them alive. You are immersed in the dead spaces of their lives, and can feel the loss of liveliness and connection, and the impacts this brings about. Time is also altered in this book; it does not seem linear. There are no connections, they are but fragment in the moments of life we witness through Adam, in particular.

The book, like the body, relies on the power of the lungs - picture an upside down tree – to kickstart a lifeforce into action, and stem through experiences and exchanges of other important components. Was Natasha was Adam’s heavy beating? Was Marita the moral compass burdening down on everyone? Was Yun the wake up call that Adam did not want? Adam seems to have temporary relief in all aspects of his life, and it was transitory at best. Maybe living and dying is not so black and white after all, and it is the in-between that is stark, blunt and absolute.