Adam Ouston, Waypoints

 

- Adam Ouston's first novel has a profundity that's easily missable.

- The narrator, Arthur Bernard Cripp, known as Bernard, is obsessed with repeating the world famous Harry Houdini’s first flight in an engine-powered plane in Australia in 1910. Because his wife and daughter were killed in a Boeing jet which crashed 100 years later (Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 on 8 March 2014, which killed 239 people) he is desperate to get some insight and closure from re-enacting Houdini's achievement. He contracts an aviation enthusiast to build an exact replica of Houdini's plane. 

- Bernard gives us a detailed, comprehensive summary of the MH370 tragedy. And the real pain he is suffering. It's very affecting. This is the central focus of this former circus owner and performer. He also searches for every detail he can find on the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shar, and his marriage, career and personal history including all his social media posts. 

- An intriguing feature of the book is Bernard's constant repetitions in the telling of the story. He rambles on in a circular motion like a babbling, dribbling, demented madman, but of course he’s nothing of the sort. It takes a while to get to know him as he wanders off on all sorts of tangents. The picture we get though is one of immense pain: ...and while we're on the subject of fate and the questions that have gnawed away at my insides these past years - sometimes I feel as though I have dealt with them, put them to bed; sometimes I feel completely numb to it all, but then the smallest, seemingly insignificant thing, a word on a billboard, a scarf in a window, a child's scream, will cause me such incredible pain that for a moment, sometimes longer, I am unable to breath and I stand there pulverised, choking on my own grief... 

- Ouston breaches all the conventions of long form fiction by dispensing with all the traditional breathing spaces: paragraphs, chapters and accepted punctuation. His sentences are always long, often lasting for pages, and the print is small, broken only occasionally by old photos. He is allergic to fullstops. Ubiquitous semicolons and commas are used instead, conveying the run-on urgency and relentlessness of Bernard's search for meaning and closure. Spaces and stops are not options. This form, often used in modern autofiction, totally suits the purpose here. 

- It doesn’t take too long to get used to this rhythm and pacing and be sucked in. The energy and clarity propels it forward. There’s a magic to it. We learn quite a lot about Bernard's career in the circus, and the places across Australia he performed in, some with interesting back stories about awful hardships suffered by early explorers, including the Calvert Expedition in WA and the lost Leichhardt Expedition in Northern Australia. Sickness and death due to starvation and drought were common. He reflects again on his own tragic loss and his struggle for survival.

- His father is suffering from Alzheimers and needs constant care at home. This must be provided by Bernard himself due to financial constraints. This feeds his passion for information. He frequently rants about how the mass storage of every spec of data under the sun, the complete sweep of history, has become banal in this age of information. Why can't it provide hope, answers and comfort? 

- He's led to reflect on Alzheimers, its history and subsequent developments such as Huxley’s ‘transhumanism’, and the enthusiasms of other radical futurists. The prospect of prosperity and fulfilment for everyone on the planet excites him. How about a brain-computer interface? We are not far off being able to bring people back from the dead. He's comforted by a vision of the future that is naive in the extreme. 

- What is missing from his reflections is a deep understanding of the nature of evil. The MH370 pilot’s career and depression are sympathetically portrayed. Bernard is not angry. He relates to him. He doesn't even mention the passenger victims apart from his wife and daughter, and whether the pilot would have considered them at all. They are just numbers. 

- Ouston subtlety rebukes his inhumane idealism, separated as it is from nature and the reality of human life in this ancient and painful world. The Boeing was not just an amazing iteration of high tech majesty, it was a weapon of death, deliberately employed by a human being.

- This is an extraordinary achievement by Ouston. It is supremely well written and deep in meaning. I can't recommend it highly enough.