Table Of ContentRory MacLean is a writer, broadcaster, blogger and Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. His nine books, including UK bestsellers Stalin’s
Nose and Under the Dragon, have challenged and invigorated travel
writing, and – according to the late John Fowles – are among works that
‘marvellously explain why literature still lives’. He has won awards from
the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England as well as a Winston
Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and was nominated for the International
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He has written and presented over 50
BBC radio programmes and worked on movies with Marlene Dietrich and
David Bowie. Born in Canada and resident for many years in Britain, Rory
now divides his time between London and Berlin.
Other books by Rory MacLean:
Stalin’s Nose
The Oatmeal Ark
Under the Dragon
Next Exit Magic Kingdom
Magic Bus
Missing Lives
Gift of Time
www.rorymaclean.com
‘Rory MacLean is one of the most strikingly original and talented travel
writers of our generation.’ Katie Hickman
‘A book that mixes lyricism with humour and compassion… MacLean’s
writing is at once whimsical and serious, funny and painful… an intimate
portrait of the sort of community we might not otherwise have encountered
outside fiction.’ Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times
‘A marvellously compelling story. An intimate geography of the author’s
own heart and a masterly observation of the power of the story to comfort,
strengthen and transform the hearts of humanity at large. Destined to
become a classic.’ Jamie Jauncey, The Scotsman
‘Touching, fresh and extremely funny. MacLean’s prose moves elegantly
from the elegiac to the ironic, from the sad to the grotesque or comic. A
triumph.’ TLS
‘An extraordinary work, curious and entertaining, tantalizing, often moving
and above all entirely original – like everything MacLean writes, it’s in a
genre of its own.’ Jan Morris
‘The heart-warming evocation of one man’s loving obsession: lyrical,
funny, compassionate.’ Colin Thubron
‘Anyone who loves Crete should enjoy this book. And anyone who does
not love Crete is only half alive.’ William Palmer, Literary Review
‘Unbridled humour, suspense… [characters] spring from the page as if
from myth.’ Scotland on Sunday
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The Colophon of Tauris Parke Paperbacks is a representation of the ancient
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of this most elegant of birds. Thoth was credited in antiquity as the scribe of the
ancient Egyptian gods and as the inventor of writing and was associated with many
aspects of wisdom and learning.
FALLING
FOR ICARUS
A Journey Among the Cretans
Rory MacLean
Foreword by Robert Macfarlane
TPP
TAURIS PARKE
PAPERBACKS
New paperback edition published in 2012 by Tauris Parke Paperbacks
An imprint of I.B.Tauris and Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
First published in 2004 by Viking
Copyright © Rory MacLean, 2004, 2005, 2012
Foreword copyright © Robert Macfarlane, 2012
Illustrations copyright © Philip Hood
Cover image: ‘Flying over water’ © Irene Lamprakou / Getty Images
The right of Rory MacLean to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 84885 956 2
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and bound in Sweden by ScandBook AB
CONTENTS
New foreword by Robert Macfarlane vii
Map xii
1. Without Wings 1
2. Beyond My Control 4
3. Messa Anissari 11
4. Flight, and My Part in Its Discovery 22
5. Winging It 36
6. To Make One Aeroplane 48
7. How Ulysses Went Mad 64
8. In a Clearing Sky 71
9. The Barber 84
10. Greeks Bearing Gifts 91
11. Trouble in Paradise 105
12. Little Hairs 114
13. Loop the Loop 128
14. Heavy Metal 150
15. Bones, or How Aphrodite Lost her Virginity 159
16. Mach 0.8 172
17. Born Again 179
18. Lease on Life 197
19. Building Icarus 208
20. Something Old, Something New 218
21. Down to Earth 245
22. Some Hope 252
23. An Old Story 261
24. On a Wing and a Prayer 268
25. Summer Time 284
26. Yes of Course Maybe Why Not? 292
27. On Top of Crete 299
28. Clear Prop! 310
29. Up, Up and ... 316
30. Elements 328
Acknowledgements 333
Afterword by Katrin MacLean 335
Foreword
The history of aviation is filled with people – mostly men – for whom the
desire to fly was a compulsion. Wilbur Wright spoke of having contracted
a ‘disease’ in the form of his ‘belief that flight is possible to man’. Otto
Lilienthal – author of the classic Birdflight As The Basis of Aviation (1889)
– made his first attempt at flight while still at school (wearing a pair of
strap-on arm-wings; he failed), and subsequently constructed an artificial
hill near Berlin for the purpose of launching test glides. The French
writer and aeronaut Antoine de Saint-Exupery could hardly bear to be
grounded, flying perilous missions as a fighter-pilot long after he could
have retired. The diminutive dandy Alberto Santos-Dumont (5’1” tall and
only 100lb in weight; vital statistics for a man who always wanted to be a
bird) grew up on his father’s coffee plantation in Brazil watching eagles
‘flying so high and soaring on their great outstretched wings’, fell in love
with the ideals of ‘space and freedom’, and vowed to follow the raptors
into their aerial kingdom.
Rory MacLean joined this ragged aeronautical dynasty of eccentrics,
obsessives and visionaries after the death of his beloved mother, Joan,
from cancer. His grief at the loss was so powerful that it left him destroyed,
dismantled. All he knew in the dark days after her death was that he
wanted – no, he needed – to build his own aeroplane and take flight: this
was ‘the single clear certainty’ visible to him, his ‘compulsion’.
So MacLean and his wife Katrin moved to a village in the north-west of
Crete, set under the Lefka Ori – the White Mountains. And there, as you’ll
hear, over the course of six months, within the hard bright light of the
Mediterranean, MacLean sought to reassemble himself by constructing
from scratch a one-man aircraft in which he might lift off – and so
acquit himself of grief’s gravity. Broken into pieces, he worked to put
himself back together. A symbolic act, then, and a ritual one: penitential,
respectful, the patient literalisation of a metaphor.
There is, of course, nothing purely symbolic about flying, or about its
opposite, falling. In 1896, on what was due to be his last test flight, Otto
Lilienthal’s unstable gliding apparatus lost its balance ‘at considerable
height’ and he dropped to his death. Santos-Dumont, after surviving a
series of elegant airship crashes in Paris, became guiltily obsessed with
viii Falling for Icarus
the idea that aeronautical technology had been turned to the inhumane
ends of bombing and invasion, lost his mind and hanged himself with
a pair of red neckties from a door-handle in São Paulo. Saint-Exupery
disappeared, probably in combat, over the Mediterranean in 1944, while
flying for the Free French Forces of De Gaulle. And we all know what
happened to Icarus. As the poet Paul Claudel nicely put it, ‘we lack wings
to fly, but we always have strength enough to fall’.
So MacLean’s quest needs to be understood as occurring both in
the realm of the allegorically symbolic and that of the riskily real. There
was a very real chance of emotional healing involved in his undertaking,
but there was also a very real chance of physical injury. The doubleness
of this wonderful book, its simultaneous inhabiting of the actual and the
mythical, is one of its most distinctive aspects.
And one of its many achievements is that almost everything within it
takes loft as metaphor. Out there on Crete, nothing can be only itself. There
are, for instance, so many aeronauts in this book, flitting suggestively
through its pages. MacLean himself, of course, the principal pilótos; but
also the trapped goldfinch in the schoolroom that he releases (discreetly
recalling the final flight of his mother’s soul, set free through an opened
window); the wheeling bats at dusk; the ‘Winged Priest’; and dear, tough,
lover-emeritus Aphrodite, lifted aloft after death on the shoulders of six
strong men and carried, airborne, from her house – the way, surely,
she would most have wanted to go. All the acts of flight in the book are
charged with a meaning that exceeds simple appearance.
There is, to my mind, no one who writes quite like Rory MacLean.
If I were forced to reach for a comparison, I would pause over Bruce
Chatwin as a possibility, but then probably stretch far, further back: to
John Mandeville, to St Brendan and to Marco Polo. These men made
their ‘wonder-voyages’ and returned bearing tales that were not to be
submitted to the usual tests of verifiability and falsifiability, but in which
the actual and the miraculous rubbed shoulders, and in which genres
and forms promiscuously coupled and bred. They told piebald, pidgin,
patchwork, mongrel stories, then: but books whose unreliability was not
mere whimsy, but aspired to a different kind of truth-telling. They sought,
in their inventiveness, to pattern reality into a greater clarity.
Falling for Icarus, like all of MacLean’s books, is a wonder-voyage in
which the speculative, the imagined and the verifiable tinge one another.
We can’t ignore this aspect of the book, partly because MacLean appears
to know things that he could not know (the inhabitation of the pasts of
Aphrodite and Ulysses, for instance), partly because of the magical-
realist moments (the thrown dinner plate that sails through two windows
and smites a teenage masturbator, the canary that never sings when
Foreword ix
spicy sausage is served for dinner, the gods with walk-on parts), but also
because again and again MacLean tips us off that all is not perhaps as
it was. ‘This is what happened’, the book confidently begins: the classic
declaration of the unreliable narrator. ‘This, and everything I will tell you,
is true’, one of the villagers declares. ‘A good story was valued over hard
facts’, notes MacLean of the oral culture of the village. ‘It was the first of
many tall stories’, he reflects, listening to a Cretan speak.
I think of MacLean’s stories not as ‘tall’ but as ‘high’; a category
difference. Tall stories are exaggerations, distortions. High stories take
flight, gain fresh perspective, occupy a different atmosphere. ‘Fiction is
woven into all’, MacLean begins his acknowledgements, ‘Sas efharisto
olous therma apo kardias’, and his own weaving of fiction into travelogue
has invigorated and continues to inspire the form for twenty years now. In
Stalin’s Nose (1992) and The Oatmeal Ark (1997) he anticipated features
of the hybrid work of W.G. Sebald, whose The Rings of Saturn is the most
influential travel book (if that is what it is) to have been published in my
lifetime. MacLean’s wilful unreliability is different in manner to Sebald’s
lugubrious ‘prose fictions’, of course, not least because Sebald is rarely
funny whereas MacLean is superbly witty (particularly in his sparkling
dialogues: a writing skill honed during his decade as a screenwriter and
filmmaker).
For all the metaphysics and myth, MacLean knows also how to keep
himself firmly grounded. The opening scene plays this out: MacLean (or
at least our narrator, who isn’t quite identical with our author) is about
to launch himself from the wall of a hillside ruin – in a suicidal fugue, or
a dream of flying, it is not quite clear which. Then – clamp! – round his
ankles slip a pair of ‘earthy’ hands, locking him down. ‘This is how I met
Yióryio’, says MacLean. And Yióryio – like the other villagers – is crucial to
MacLean’s healing, and vital to his book. What MacLean knew was that
he needed ballast for his writing’s loftier ambitions. The villagers provide
this necessary weight. Crete is a mythical terrain, a crucible of civilization
– but its contemporary inhabitants as we meet them are drinkers, farters,
fighters, friends and fornicators, like the rest of us, and the landscape is
one of rubbish, alcoholism, road traffic accidents and historical atrocity,
as well as of sunsets, ruins and emerald seas. Throughout, the airy finds
its match in the earthy, levity in gravity, flight in fall, and pathos in bathos
(which Alexander Pope nicknamed ‘the art of sinking’). It is all beautifully
balanced (unlike MacLean’s aircraft, as it turns out).
There is a fascinating absence in this book. MacLean’s mother, Joan,
barely exists. She is scarcely evoked. Her death prompts MacLean’s
journey to Crete and triggers his quest for flight, but after that, well, she
almost vanishes. There is a trueness to this absence, it seems to me,
