A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

In the bar we practiced the noble art of medicine. We knew the sickness and the remedy. "Ailment - death of a close friend or companion: remedy - wash the brain wound well with alcohol until the infected area becomes numb to the touch. Continue the treatment until the wound closes. A scar will remain, but this will not show after a while.

Another fighter pilot's memoir! This one is from WWII. He was shot down and badly burned, had his hands and face reconstructed by pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe, became a member of the Guinea Pig Club where he knew Richard Hillary, goes back to being a pilot, vows to bring down fifteen planes for each of his fifteen surgeries, does it, breaks his back in another crash, is sent back to McIndoe for treatment for that, and finally becomes a test pilot right in time for the war to end. No one can say this guy had an uneventful life.

Heartbreakingly, McIndoe didn't want to certify either Page or Hillary as fit to return to duty; he spent so much time getting to know them and putting them back together, he didn't want to give them his stamp of approval to go back and most likely be killed.

One thing puzzled me. Page writes that when Hillary died in a training accident, some people thought it was suicide, but Page believed there was no way Hillary would have killed his observer along with himself. Enigmatically, he writes that he knew Hillary and he knows why he crashed. But he doesn't say why. Anyone have any idea what was up with that?

Another minor bit that I found interesting was a funny anecdote in which he meets two beautiful young women at a party and mentions that he needs to find a place to crash. They invite him to come home with them. He eagerly accepts, thinking he's in for a threesome, but is disappointed when they show him to a bedroom and close the door. In fact, he writes, they were lesbians and very much in love. I mention this because it's an incident from the middle of WWII, in which two women were living together, it was known at least within their friend circle that they were lesbians, and it was no big deal - the joke here was very much on Page and his assumptions.

Page is a very good writer for the most part, and writes with equal vividness of flying, of combat, and of his hospital experience. If von Richthofen's memoir was emotionally one-note, this was the remedy: Page details the rage, fear, camaraderie, grief, joy, bloodlust, revenge, lust, humor, and exhaustion that was his war experience. Of course he had the benefit of hindsight, as this was written well after the war ended.

I've meant to read this since 2018, when I read Hillary's memoir followed by a much more dry account of The Guinea Pig's Club. Better late than never!

The end trails off into somewhat random anecdotes about his postwar job experiences, but other than that, this is an excellent book. Recommended.

This prompted me to take a deep dive into the Guinea Pig Club. The Wikipedia entry is now way more useful than the last time I checked, providing a complete list of memoirs by members, many still available (though not the one with the deadpan or perhaps merely factual title I Burned My Fingers), and also a list of pages of individual members. The latter is a trip and I will post some of my findings tomorrow.

The Curse of Nonfiction strikes again: fascinating topic, dry book.

An account of pioneering burn surgeon Archibald McIndoe and The Guinea Pig Club, a group of badly burned WWII airmen who he treated in a small hospital in England. McIndoe not only revolutionized techniques for treating and reconstructing burn injuries, he also helped the men integrate into the community. (Link goes to Wikipedia; good article, no gruesome photos.) I got interested in this after reading Richard Hilary's memoir, The Last Enemy.

It’s a really interesting story, but the book was a bit of a slog that periodically came to life in the handful of first-person accounts by the airmen themselves. It also benefited from both photos (not gruesome IMO – they’re of the men, not of the burns themselves - though some are startling/unsettling as they show some stages of reconstruction. ( Read more... )). Also cartoons by a member of the Guinea Pig Club.

I did appreciate the historical background. For instance, it explains that one reason McIndoe's techniques were revolutionary was that previous to WWII, anyone burned as badly as many of these men would have died within hours or days, and so reconstructive surgery for those sorts of injuries was a moot point. This was the period when doctors were figuring out how to treat shock, which meant that all of a sudden, people were surviving with wounds that previously would have killed them. And then doctors had to figure out what to do to help them then. (Incidentally, the issue of what to do with people with previously non-survivable injuries is still ongoing, and there have been conceptual breakthroughs in how to treat shock/blood loss just in the last ten years - also due to war. It's the quintessential mixed blessing.)

There’s also a very informative explanation of why so many men got burned the way they did (placement of the fuel tank) and why that was such a difficult issue to solve, as among other problems a lot of the possible solutions would have made the planes heavier and so slower and less agile, which then would make them more likely to be hit in the first place.

However, I was primarily interested in the experience of the airmen and those parts were good, but the rest of the book was pretty textbook-y. I also would have liked to know more about what their lives were like after they left the hospital.



I see now that another member of the Guinea Pig Club wrote a memoir. I’m thinking that’s what I actually want to read.

From the first chapter of the memoir of a WWII fighter pilot; he has just gone down in flames, and is floating in the ocean, badly burned and alone:

There can be few more futile pastimes than yelling for help alone in the North Sea, with a solitary seagull for company, yet it gave me a certain melancholy satisfaction, for I had once written a short story in which the hero (falling from a liner) had done just this. It was rejected.

99 cent ebook on Amazon: The Last Enemy

Before this becomes all Stephen King, all the time, I thought I'd do some quick write-ups of nonfiction I read a while back. All of these are survival stories of plane crashes. I am putting them in order of quality, from best to worst.

Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival, by Laurence Gonzales. A meticulously researched and very readable account of the plane crash in a corn field fictionalized in Peter Weir's haunting movie Fearless. Gonzales (author of the fantastic Deep Survival) tells a gripping story of tragedy and heroism, of chance and courage and survival. I ended up skipping the chapter which gets into overly technical details of the exact cause of the mechanical failure that caused the crash, but otherwise it's a very well-done book about a tragedy that could have been so much worse.

About a third of the passengers died; if not for the quick thinking of the pilots (including one flying as a passenger who got recruited to help out), probably everyone would have; if not for their decision to try to land in a cornfield at great risk to their lives, probably people would have been killed on the ground. There are also a number of individual rescues, plus a fascinating account of the emergency response on the ground.

The book has a haunting quality, not just because of the deaths but because of the strangeness of the incident; many passengers found themselves lost in a cornfield, with the plane invisible, as if they'd been transported to another world. And like all large-scale incidents, some questions will never be answered. One man remembers a woman with perfect clarity, but no woman matching that description was on the flight. This is the crash where a man climbed back into the burning, smoke-filled plane to save a baby, whom he miraculously found unhurt in a luggage compartment. I knew that part, but there's a heartbreaking sequel that I didn't know: the baby girl committed suicide at the age of fifteen. No one knows why, or if the crash had anything to do with it.

Highly recommended, if you like that kind of thing and you're not feeling emotionally fragile.

81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska's Frozen Wilderness, by Brian Murphy is the story of Leon Crane, a WWII test pilot who was the sole survivor of a crash in Alaska, and made his way back to safety in 81 days despite virtually no supplies or wilderness training, through a combination of grit, intelligence, and some incredibly good luck involving where he crashed - even ten miles in any other direction might have led him to miss something without which he would have been very unlikely to survive.

This is biography, not memoir, and is somewhat hampered by Crane's reluctance to talk about what happened, apparently not due to trauma but to a combination of natural reticence, humility, and the sense that it was a profound experience which could not be put into words, or which words might spoil. So a lot of the story is reconstructed from second-hand accounts, yet gets into enough detail of what Crane might have been thinking and so forth that I would consider it creative nonfiction rather than strict nonfiction, as the next two books are.

If you like survival stories, you will like this. Despite some hiccups, it's generally well-written, clear, vivid, and engrossing. I would say it's good but not great.

My trade paperback omits dialogue marks apparently at random for the first few chapters; I assume this is an error, because if it's a writing choice it's inexplicable and distracting. Hopefully it is an error and your version will not have it.

Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds: The Tragedy & Triumph of ASA Flight 529, by Gary M. Pomerantz. This is similar to Gonzales' book, but tells the story of a different crash. It's good but not as good; it also has a lot of descriptions of horrific, month-long deaths by burns that I found hard to read. It's also haunting in other ways: the stewardess who saved many people's lives got PTSD and never really recovered; she had to stop flying, and while she finally did get on a plane many years later, as a passenger, she never managed to appreciate the lives she saved, but only blamed herself for the people she couldn't save.

As you can tell, I am fascinated by plane crashes. They seem to cause more and more severe PTSD in survivors than other types of accidents, perhaps because everyone but the pilots feel out of control and because survival is primarily about where you were sitting, not what you did. People don't seem to do well with terrible incidents that rub in how much chance is a factor. The freakish, unusual nature also seems to not help. (PTSD from car crashes occurs, but not that frequently. I think it's because drivers have some sense of control, and car crashes are relatively normal and common, unlike plane crashes.)

The Light of the Moon: Life, Death and the Birth of Advanced Trauma Life Support. A memoir by a man whose father, a doctor, crashed his small plane in a rural area at night with his entire family in it. His wife was killed, but his children survived with severe injuries. He was not happy with their treatment at the hospital they were initially transported to, and discovered that there were no nationwide guidelines for treating mass trauma victims. So he created and implemented them, nationwide, no doubt saving thousands and thousands of lives.

The author was a boy and unconscious after the crash, so he apparently interviewed his father to get an account of it. That part is very good. The rest of the book… Well, he's clearly not a pro author. There's endless accounts of the search for the plane which are sometimes interesting and sometimes incredibly tedious. His account of his own research as an adult into what happened is generally awful - he literally has pages and pages detailing how he googled stuff.

The parts I was really curious about - his and his family's recovery, and how his father managed to implement medical protocols nationwide - are mainly skipped over. He says that his nine-year-old brother lost ALL his memory of everything that happened before the crash. If he means his entire life, WOW do I want to hear about that and how he coped - he would have never remembered his mother, for instance. But since the author says nothing more about it, I assume it was a poorly worded sentence and he means that his brother had some degree of anteretrograde amnesia - maybe days, maybe even months - but not his whole life.

Interesting story, not told too well. Bad or flawed memoirs typically have this issue of too much filler and a failure to distinguish between what the author and reader is interested in.

Code Name: Verity is one of the best books I've read this year. I expected it to be excellent, since Wein is such a good writer and the author of several other favorite books of mine, but it surpassed my expectations.

The novel is best-read knowing as little as possible about it, since it goes in a number of unexpected but logical directions, so I will confine my description to what you learn within the first 20 or so pages:

The book is in the form of a confession written by a captured British spy during WWII. The spy is a young woman who parachuted into France after her plane crashed. Her best friend, Maddie, was the pilot, and was killed in the crash. The spy is being held prisoner and tortured by the Gestapo; to play out the remaining time she has left, buy herself an easier death, and to memorialize her best friend, she has agreed to give up information in exchange for being allowed to write her confession at book length, and to tell the entire story of how everything came to pass.

I don't think it's spoilery to say that the reliability of the narrator is questionable; that's inherent in the set-up. But how she's unreliable, how she's reliable, and why is both fun to unravel and, like the rest of the story, moving and heartbreaking. This is that rare thing, a story of female friendship as intense as any other sort of love. It's extremely well-written, suspenseful, meticulously researched, and cleverly plotted.

As you can predict if you've read any of Wein's other books, the characters are great and it's extremely, extremely emotionally intense. There are no graphic details, but the psychological depiction of what it feels like to be tortured and helpless - and to hold on to whatever you can of your power and self under circumstances where that feels impossible - is one of the most realistic I've ever read. I would not schedule any important meetings or dates or anything where you need to be emotionally together and focused immediately after finishing this book. It's terrific, not depressing, a book I'm sure I will re-read. But like I said... intense.

Also, female friendship! Girl pilots! Girl spies! Intrigue! War! And even humor and wit, which is certainly needed.

I don't usually make award predictions, but I'm going to throw my hat in the ring for this one: Code Name Verity is going to win the Newbery Medal. You heard it here first.

Code Name Verity



Please do not put spoilers in comments. If enough of you have already read it to make a discussion possible and you'd like to have a spoilery discussion, please say so in comments, and I'll open a separate spoiler post later.

Wein's other books form a sequence which is ideally read in order. However, I'll mark good starting points.

The Winter Prince. An intense, unconventional Arthurian retelling, also with an unusual narrative structure: a letter from Medraut (Mordred) to his aunt, Morgause. This gives Arthur two legitimate children, a son, Lleu, and a daughter, Goewin. It's mostly about the relationship between Medraut and Lleu, but Goewin is a very interesting character. Especially good depictions of PTSD and healing from trauma.

A Coalition of Lions (Arthurian Sequence, Book 2). After the battle of Camlann, Goewin ends up in Aksum (ancient Ethiopia.) Works as a bridge between the first book and the next sequence, but not as strong on its own as the rest of the series.

The Sunbird. If you don't need to know the details of everything that went down previously, you could start here with the knowledge that Medraut went to Aksum and had a son, Telemakos, with an Aksumite woman. Very good, but warning for child harm: Telemakos is very young and endures some very bad things. (Not sexual abuse.)

The Lion Hunter (The Mark of Solomon) and The Empty Kingdom (Mark of Solomon Book Two). One book in two volumes. Telemakos, now a teenager, is still suffering from the aftereffects of his spy mission in the last book. But, of course, the reward for a difficult job well-done is another difficult job. You could start here, too, if you don't mind not knowing the exact details of what went down. Fantastic, well-written, atmospheric, well-characterized story. Yet another excellent depiction of trauma and healing. Again, extremely intense, but easier to take since he's no longer a child. Try not to get spoiled for anything in this - don't even read the cover copy.