The Flying Shadow

by John Llewelyn Rhys

In the 1930s, flying was all the rage. All over Britain women and men had grown up watching wartime flying aces perform aerobatics in the sky. Now they too were learning how to fly. Robert Owen is the only son from a Welsh vicarage, now a brilliant pilot and flying instructor, recently of the Royal Air Force. He has taken a new job at the flying school at Best, a prosperous cathedral town in England. Flying has never seemed so alluring and so terrifying. Human frailty is tested in the drilling and repetition of hours in flight, and Robert’s skills as a pilot and in diplomacy with pupils with delusions about their competence are tested to their limits. And then he falls in love, risking his heart as well as his body in the air.

195 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

John Llewellyn Rhys was a British author who was killed while serving as a bomber pilot in the Royal Air Force.

He was posthumously honored with the Hawthornden Prize 1942 for his book England is My Village.

His widow, Jane Oliver, created the prestiguous John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in his honour. The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize is open to British and Commonwealth writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, aged 35 or under, at the time of publication.

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book about flying back in the early days (1930s), written by an accomplished pilot who has been compared to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his lyricism and poetic prose. I loved this primarily because I love flying and used to have my Private Pilot’s License. It took me back to the days I spent at the flying school in the late 1970s and early 80s. It was very similar to the school described by Mr Rhys although I was flying a Piper Cherokee and not a Gypsy Moth. I recognize the same types of people. So my enjoyment of this book is thick with nostalgia. The writing is beautiful and evocative of the delight of taking to the air and being apart from the everyday world. I look forward to reading his other works, all of which have recently been re-published by Handheld Press. I appear to be the first reader and reviewer of this book on Goodreads.

[Mark Bowden · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange and bleak novel. I enjoyed it while I was reading it but I am not sure that I will look back on it with much fondness. The protagonist is moody, prejudiced (of his time), pugnacious and even violent but I liked, or at least admired, him. He wants to be left alone to get on with his job and the worst aspects of his character show when others prevent him, accidentally or deliberately, from doing that. One can sympathise. His reflections on society's ills are largely sound and quite radical, which makes his prejudices (against English agricultural labourers and schoolboys, for instance) all the more shocking.
The author's style has some odd characteristics. For example, towards the end of the book information that drives the plot forward is sometimes given in italics, often in a single line, as if the author couldn't be bothered to write about it, so is giving it to us in note form.
Another oddity is in the naming of characters: there are two characters called Riseling and Hateling and others with similarly unlikely names, a high proportion ending in '-ing'. This can't be deliberate; it's as if the author just wrote the first thing that came into his head and often it was similar to the previous first thing that had come into his head. Why didn't he or an editor at Fabers change it?
Despite these oddities this is a fine book which gives a vivid picture of the technicalities (where comprehensible) of flying and the attitudes of flyers between the wars.