Book Review: In-Flight Entertainment

Published on Friday 14 May 2010 19:10

In-Flight Entertainment By Helen Simpson Cape, 144pp, £14.99

AS WRITERS age, so, often, do the subjects they write about. Since the publication 20 years ago of her first book of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Helen Simpson has touched on – in more or less chronological order – sex, marriage, childbirth, motherhood and disappointment.

Now, with this, her fifth collection, she turns her miniaturist's eye to sudden illness, tumours, the infirmities of old age and death, taking in climate change and marital infidelity along the way.

In a story called "Sorry", a tetchy widower struggling to cope with deafness is forced to live with his daughter. His new hearing aid is giving him spooky auditory hallucinations he can't explain; he can hear his daughter talking but her lips don't move. As he ponders how spoilt and demanding his tiny grandchildren are, his daughter's voice tells him what an awful father he himself was, chiding him: "I don't want to hand on the misery. I don't want that horrible Larkin poem to be true." It gets worse.

In the title story, "In-Flight Entertainment", a young man is upgraded to first class and gets into an argument with a passenger in his seventies about global warming. The older man blames flying for most of the greenhouse gas emission but, since it will be at least 15 years before anything terrible results, declares selfishly that it should see him out. So why does he fly? "It gets us out of the house, and we don't care about the delays because it makes the time we've got left seem longer," he replies.

And in a sharply drawn vignette of family life called "Squirrel", all parents of teenagers will recognise the stroppy 17-year-old girl who, the second her mobile rings, becomes "instantly transported from cold-eyed fury to smiles and coos of delight". While her father is preoccupied with the squirrel he's caught in the garden, her mother wonders whether she's giving out any signs she's having an affair.

Reading these 15 stories reminds you what horribly painful collisions there would be if we spoke our thoughts out loud.