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Book Review The Independent July 2, 2003 

Reviewed By Joan Baum
PRISONERS OF FLIGHT, The Permanent Press, New York

We wince, we keep reading. This first novel by a Montana doctor of veterinary medicine moves with compelling, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes brutal, imagery. Shelley is famously blunt for opening his elegiac tribute to Keats, “I weep for Adonais -- he is dead.” 

But here’s Gustafson, starting off this strange tale of bonding in the Northwest wilderness with “Henson’s dead.” Hen Son, part Blackfeet Indian, part Cree, had his name anglicized by the military. Later on, what Vietnam did not destroy, Captain Henson lost to a freak fishing accident and an inability to reconnect with the world of civilization -- an eye, his wife, his ranching business, though not his love of nature or a capacity for deep friendship with the narrator, Dr. Sling Roop, a veterinarian. 

Their lives go back to training days in the Air Force Academy and then, after being shot down over the China Sea, to time spent at the Hanoi “Hilton,” where they were tortured. Prisoners of flight, they become prisoners of those memories. Ironically, they also find escape from the past in flying. 

Prisoners of Flight begins with a brief present-tense prologue by Sling, who is airborne, but as he recalls Henson’s recent death, and “clouds bleed up the setting sun,” his judgment falters and the plane goes down. Injured, stunned, memories invade, and the stream of consciousness that ensues constitutes the actual story that will eventually connect with the prologue and explain how Henson died. The memories are many-layered but center on the recent weeks when Sling and Henson lived together in the wilderness after they flew blind and crashed in a desolate part of northern Montana. Within minutes of that crash, two college-age girls appeared, having seen the plane fall. They are twins, running away from an unhappy home and searching for their dog, who bounded into the forest. The situation is bizarre, but Gustafson avoids the expected and with great skill pulls their stories together, showing how they are all prisoners of flight. Essentially, however, the novel is a kind of love story between Sling and Hen, two maimed souls whose intimacy allows them to communicate with subtle gestures and code taps, and whose fierce need to escape into a pure, albeit dangerous sky, speaks volumes about the psychological and physical damage wrought by the Vietnam war, the addictions it bred, and the irreparable social discontent it generated. 

It’s amazing what Gustafson packs in, including lore about veterinary medicine, some of it as discomforting as it is true, about what even the most compassionate animal lover has to undergo interning and then in practice. War made Sling “an animal” and drove him to drugs, but another war drew him to alcohol -- the losing battle against “stupid heartless people” who insisted he put their healthy pets to sleep. He loses wife, son, daughter, and home. Nonetheless, he is an admirable, decent human being, and readers will lament the passing of his kind: Machines? Not for him. They don’t know “the tone, the surge of capillaries, the pulsing blood.” People today “insist on machines—numeric proof, undeniable proof. They don’t trust a doctor’s touch, not anymore. I’m on my way out.” 

In the wilderness, with Henson, Sling finds the insecurity he needs to slow him down and allow him to be a fully sensate being. “Living here is a ceremony, replete with sacrifice and rapture.” Together, in nurturing mode, Sling and Henson teach the girls what it means to live and face death. Yet, for all his instinctive and intuitive smarts, Sling knows he is not an animal, that man cannot live in the wilderness, that flight has limits. This is a haunting book. As summer deepens and city folk look to nature, to the outback, to so-called roughing it, it is refreshing to come across a literary account of The Real Thing -- so graphic, so poetically rendered. 

Prisoners of Flight, a novel by Sid Gustafson, The Permanent Press, 176 pp. $18 

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