"The sun was shining as if nothing mattered." (pg. 232)

After a laboured start, Hornet's Sting ultimately proves to be one of the better Derek Robinson novels. The seven I have read out of the eight RFC/RAF books all have the same positives and negatives, but to different degrees: on the good side, they possess strong writing (particularly in aerial combat), intelligent discussion of the planes and the theatre of war chosen, and, when done in moderation, some sharp and witty dialogue. Characters are offed with an on-the-nose heartlessness that really rams home the waste of war. On the bad side, the books tend towards a lack of a plot through-line, a snarky cynicism that easily tilts into exhausting nihilism, and a strange emphasis on tedium, banter and cuckoldry over air combat and flight.

It's never about quality in Robinson's books, as this is something you can always be assured of to some extent; it's about the mixture. Hornet's Sting is the best so far of the RFC Quartet (I have yet to read A Splendid Little War) and only behind two of the RAF Quartet (A Good Clean Fight and Piece of Cake) on points. Hornet's Sting has some truly strong scenes; the first disastrous patrol of the Bristol Fighter and the scene in the aerial photography hut, as the pilots watch the mud creep over the Passchendaele front that the infantry must now take, both spring to mind.

The latter scene hints at one of Hornet's Sting's greatest strengths; its appreciation of the P.B.I. ('poor bloody infantry') even when the story is told exclusively from the point of view of the more upper-class, self-serving pilots of the Royal Flying Corps. "They didn't sacrifice their silly lives," one character says on page 272. "Other people organized their deaths." Derek Robinson's trademark cynicism-cum-nihilism is perfect for this battle, and this war, in a way that its predecessors, Goshawk Squadron and War Story, somehow lacked.

"He remembered what it was like to be a pilot; the glorious, god-like feeling of soaring away from the pettiness of Earth," Robinson writes in another fine passage (pg. 123), which makes it so odd and so frustrating that this writer so often indulges the same pettiness. At times, it seems like Robinson can only conceive of two types of pilot; the useless, wide-eyed novice and the malicious, upper-class bastard. It is slightly unfair to criticise Robinson's characterization, for he finds variation in character within these two paradigms, but the relentless cheerlessness can be extremely exhausting in such rich writing. It's almost like Robinson is cutting his nose off to spite his face, even before you get to such over-the-top scenes as the pilot who bayonets two soldiers on his own side, just because he can (pg. 389), and over-the-top characters like Dorothy, a prototype of the feckless upper-class slut Zoë from Damned Good Show and Hullo Russia, Goodbye England, who thankfully isn't indulged quite as much as the finished model from those later books.

My reviews of Robinson's books too often focus on the negatives, I know, but it's mostly out of exasperation than opposition, as the books repeatedly flash moments of brilliance alongside their wonkier moments. Robinson is technically excellent, but it can be hard to truly enjoy a writer who writes tedium, nihilism and public-schoolboy fatuousness so well. With one book to go, I'm unlikely to find a truly establishing representative of Robinson's talent that I can defend against all comers, but the fact that I've read and enjoyed seven testifies to their quality. Sometimes excellent, sometimes hard-going; with only one book remaining unread in the series, ultimately I think I'll miss them when they're gone. ( )

Excellent novel, places you firmly amongst the young men of the RFC and the world around them. ( )

This is a good story about the "Hornet Squadron" fighting over the Western Front in 1917. It is often funny, but throughout it is an accurate portrayal of the horror of the war its effect on the men who fought it. It is difficult to talk about the cast of characters, because very few can be followed through the complete story: an accurate reflection of the astonishingly short life-span of the pilots, so short that they become interchangeable because they are transient on their short road to death. As a result, as noted by one new pilot, there does not seem to be the comradery that he expected, but rather a manic existence of boredom punctuated by the terror and death of air patrols and battles and sudden, if you're lucky, death and the wild, cathartic parties of booze and high spirits and the smashing of furniture. This produces a hedonistic approach to life where every chance for fleeing happiness, or sexual congress, must be grasped because there may be no tomorrow. The futility of the great "pushes" by the infantry, where hundreds of thousand of men were slain for a few meters of ground likely given up a few weeks or months later, are mirrored in the Deep Offensive Patrols demanded by the Air Service which put the pilots at great risk for the sake of a theory that had little to do with the reality of fighting in the air.

The clash between reality and theory is also shown when the squadron receives some new Bristol fighters (two-seaters) and practice a static, positional type of formation-fighting that results in a great number of aircraft being shot down the first time they encounter the enemy. It is Wooley, the complete non-conformist, cynical, former squadron leader and then instructor and then back to the front as a pilot, who shows the skeptical pilots how to fly the Bristol like a real fighter so as to be able to take advantage of what it can do. And the stupidity of the war machine never ceases to amaze with the provost-marshal investigating the loss of 200 jars of marmalade while men are dying daily, and to what end? The other thing that strikes one in reading about how these men reacted and fought in the air war, is how very young they were: anyone in his early 20s would be considered old, and many were only in their late teens, formative years that forge in them an ability to kill and to try to deal with terror of capricious and sudden death, but which some know will equip them for nothing else should they survive the carnage.

There is an almost surreal scene towards the end of the book when Paxton, one of the pilots, crash lands his aircraft in a forest on the German side of the lines. He survives because the trees break the fall, he finds and kills two German guards at an empty ammunition depot, puts on a German uniform and mixes among the troops, unnoticed as just another wounded, disoriented, hungry, dispossessed soldier who eventually gets caught up in an attack over the top into British machine guns. Before the attack a German soldier shares his flask of schnapps and when this man is killed in the attack, Paxton storms the machine-gun nest, killing the two British soldiers, and then turning the machine-gun on the advancing Germans until relieved by British troops. Paxton is taken back to the airdrome, but dies days later of delayed shock. Robinson captures nicely the madness of the war and the interchangeability of the experience and hopes and fears of the men on either side, men simply trying to survive in an unimaginable world of terror and high explosive for which they saw no end, and no reason.