The UAP book club is a relatively new one, we only started last  year. It is a works club and we meet lunchtimes, once a month, in a local café in Poole, which luckily for us, in the nice weather has an outside area. We nominate a main book and then a bonus book for our more voracious readers. We started off our first read with a Terry Pratchett book (Good Omens) for the simple reason that none of us had read any Terry Pratchett books. Our bonus book was Artemis Fowl, which everyone, without exception, enjoyed. We have also read and for the most part enjoyed, The God of Small Things, Anne of Green Gables, Birdsong, Love in the Time of Cholera and The Divide to name but a few.
On a regular basis we have around 6 to 8 people who attend each meeting. The reviews from each of the books are published on our Intranet.

Most of the books we read provoke a good discussion and Falling for Icarus was no exception. Due to holidays we didn’t all manage to finish the book in the first month so carried it over. This is what we had to say about the book.

Falling for Icarus

This book is all about someone coping with a loved ones death by building and flying a plane, but rather than doing this at home, he decided that Crete would be the ideal place. As he went through the process of gathering the materials and building the plane he got integrated into village life (and death), so much so that even the holidaymakers who came to the village thought him mad, although the local people accepted his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities without compromise. They did not consider him weird! With help (and hindrance) from the locals he eventually builds and flies his plane.

The book is essentially a series of “incidents” involving the local inhabitants and their histories. We generally felt sorry for his wife, who didn’t seem to have much of a say in anything but was just expected to tag along and support him!

There was a good discussion about the death of one of the locals. The author showed that Greek culture, especially in the villages, treats death very differently from English culture. Although some of it was pretty gruesome (like the fact that the coffin was too small and the body was laid on its side and that an arm fell out of the coffin when being lowered into the ground), the sorrow that came across was real. 

When we got to the end of the book, we felt that it finished too quickly, after all the big build up of building the plane. There was not much about actually flying it! It was poignant that although the reason for building and flying the plane was to overcome the death of his mother the writer didn’t get a feeling that she was with him when he did fly.

General Comments about the book

· The book’s humour is understated and is character rather than incident driven
· The references to Mythology were liked by some but not all of the group
· The Greek names of people and wordings didn’t make it an easy read
· Enjoyed the people even though (or because?)  they were very eccentric
· Difficult to categorise – fiction? Biography? Travel?
· Enjoyed the cultural images and the way he describes the people and their daily lives, in particular the story of Adriadne showing how she made her way against the cultural pressures of her era and also the barber’s story.
· His method of grieving seemed excessive
· Modern Greece does not seem to exist – it’s almost as if the village and its people are lost in a time warp.
· Liked the way history was woven into the story and that the people were so believable