There is a thin line between a geek and a nutter. Britain excels at a brand of eccentricity that verges on the insane: trainspotters and plane-spotters, collectors of thimbles and airline sickbags and banana stickers, blogging fanclubs for everything from road signs to the shipping forecast. Philosopher and self-promoting supremo Alain de Botton knows his home market, and this book about the daily life of Heathrow airport seeks to show how the mundane can be uplifting, revealing and engaging. The thing is, though, often it isn’t.
Appointed Heathrow’s first-ever writer-in-residence in August, de Botton was given a desk in the departures hall, food and drink, a bed at Terminal 5’s swanky Sofitel hotel and, no doubt, some sort of stipend for his efforts. With a clear view of stressed passengers and the freedom to move around making conversation and generating press (the Today programme’s Evan Davis popped in for a chat), he gifts us Victorian -sounding meditations such as “With the aggressive whistling of their engines, the airborne visitors seemed to be rebuking this domestic English morning for its somnolence” or tells us that the foreign bills at the bureau de change “were worn and creased from heavy use”.
Compare de Botton’s insight-bereft maunderings with the BBC’s engrossing Secret Life of the Airport or with JG Ballard’s metallurgical metaphors on airport architecture Crash, and you realise that this book is a missed opportunity. I’d have preferred poetry by frightened passengers, the confessions of a customs officer, or even chats with the toilet attendant about how different nations sit. But de Botton has missed the button here, and any access he was granted seems to have been carefully managed. It’s only a latent and collective British brand of depression that makes the banal a necessary palliative to the dangers of happiness and it takes an artist – think Cortazar, Goncharov or Beckett – to render life’s dullest routines fascinating and fruitful. A writer with a talent for lyricism might have achieved that. De Botton does not. Chris Moss
Source : Time Out Delhi ISSUE 11 Friday, August 20, 2010
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