Travel writer’s fiction career gets off to flying start

There are problems inherent in reviewing a book written by a good friend. What if it’s awful – a badly written wasteland, strewn with dangling participles and rogue apostrophes? Or a story line that just doesn’t hold up?

Thankfully no such horrors attend The Butler’s Son, Geoff Hill’s first venture into fiction.

The book is a delightful read, a short novel filled with a zest for life, the pathos of war, burgeoning love (with a bit of lust thrown in for good measure) and a wealth of drama and detail, historical and technical, that shows the author knows what he’s talking about.

Geoff Hill is known to many as a witty travel writer and an adventurer.

From his redoubt off the Antrim Road in Belfast, he has sallied forth on motorcycle adventures over the past 10 years or so, writing books along the way including chronicling a skite from India to Belfast on a Royal Enfield and another from Chicago to Los Angeles on a Harley along Route 66 (brought together in one volume as Way To Go), plus The Road to Gobbler’s Knob – Chile to Alaska on a Motorbike (all along the pan-American highway), Oz – Around Australia on a Triumph, and, most recently, In Clancy’s Boots (following the trail of the first man, Carl Stearns Clancy, to ride a motorbike around the world, which he did in 1912/1913, starting in Dublin).

Geoff and I have done a few lesser trips together, though I did ride some of the way with him on the Clancy caper.

Apart from all that, he’s also a pilot and edits Microlight Flying, a journal for enthusiasts, pens a motorbike column for the Daily Mirror and writes regular off-beat travel pieces for several Northern Ireland and British newspapers and magazines.

The Butler’s Son tells the story of Max Edwards, the son of a butler who grows up on a modest estate, Termon, in Co Tyrone and who is introduced with the memorable opening line: “Max Edwards was eighteen when he saw the woman he loved, and the man he wanted to kill”. The woman was Kumiko, the oriental wife of the master of Termon, Major Martin, whom Edwards dearly wished was not around.

It being 1914, Max heads off to war, first to the trenches of the western front, and then the skies above them, as a member of that small band of first World War fliers whose lives were generally short but who gave birth, ultimately, to the Royal Air Force. The book is a picaresque in which Max and his pal from home, Bentley Priory, live fast and. . . all the time the reader is waiting for them to die young.

Hill is excellent, as one might expect from the pilot of a small plane, on the technical details of flying and describing getting airborne, managing flight and landing again. His narrative descriptions of mess room banter and gallows humour rings true.

So too, his description of the fast pace of life at the front – airmen bedding nurses as often as possible (and they seeming to share the “tomorrow we die” approach to enjoyment) – and death.

Max falls in love with Yvette, a French nurse, who gently educates him in the bedroom. She gets blown to pieces when Allied shells, targeted according to information supplied by Max, fall short and demolish her house.

There is a harrowing – and vivid – description of the death of Jones, the desperately innocent teenage son of the CO. Filled with wide-eyed enthusiasm – lots of gosh, great and right-o – for having a go at the Hun.

On his first real flight into battle after one lesson, Jones’ single-seat Camel biplane is peppered by the Red Baron, von Richthofen, sending a fine spray of fuel over the cockpit and pilot that inevitably catches fire.

Without a parachute, Jones stands up and, engulfed by flames, steps into the void as if to walk away. Max can do nothing but watch in horror as he tumbles over and over, plunging to his death followed by the spiralling inferno of his doomed plane.

These things happened to some of the pioneers of the Royal Flying Corps. That much we know but it still shocks when read today.

Happily, for all the horrors that he witnesses, Max survives and returns to Termon, still carrying the good luck charm Kumiko, made lonely by an inattentive major, slipped into his hand as he set off for war. The course of true love will not be denied.

Hill’s perky personality and chipper turn of phrase peppers the narrative. Friends are “chums”, things are “spot on” or “grand job”. His roving eye likes to dwell on feminine beauty; much of the narrative is through dialogue and Hill captures what appears, to this reviewer at any rate, exactly the sort of clipped manner adopted by the military of the time.

The book is heavily influences by Hill’s own background. He spent much of his childhood at Termon (now sadly dilapidated and on a Northern Ireland housing “at risk” list) where his grandfather Edward was butler.

One can sense a slight wistfulness for the world that was then at Termon – a benevolent upper middle class family and a settled order in which a good butler was valued and cherished the status they had. It was a world fatally damaged by the first World War, so vividly portrayed by Hill, and all that followed.
The Butler's Son by Geoff Hill (Thunderchild Publishing, £6.75, or Kindle £2.25, via Amazon UK). Hill's second novel, Angel Street, an epic tale of love and betrayal spanning two continents and the 20th century, is just out, also available from Amazon, price £8.42