“The description “airport novel” is mildly pejorative; it implies that the book has little lasting value, and is useful chiefly as an inexpensive form of entertainment during travel.” Wikipedia
There’s something about sitting at an airport, waiting for a flight, that puts me in a bookish mood. Its not the patchy Wi-Fi that gets me reaching for a hardback. It’s the combination of a contemplative mood and having time on my hands before getting on the plane. And I’m not looking for some transitory pulp fiction at the airport newsagent. This is not an “airport novel” quick fix that I want. I don’t want a literary McDonald’s, I want some food for thought.
Airports trigger this mood of reflection in me because they are, by their nature, pauses in between places. Unless I have already scheduled some pick-ups in Duty Free, there is little to think about except the place you’re about to leave and what that has meant to you, and the place you’re about to head to and what that means for you. For an expat like me, that usually means a visit to family back home or elsewhere that’s just ended, and the work routine I am headed back to.
In about 2008, before boarding a plane back to the UK after a short holiday break in Dubai, I was moseying about in an airport bookshop. I was reflecting on the unrelenting hours I was investing at work which meant that my holidays were not so much time to enjoy but rather time to recover. One minute of catching my breath slumped in the corner of the ring before I ploughed forward once more into a pugilistic headwind. I was looking for something that might align with these feelings of introspection at the end of a holiday. I kid you not, I came across a book with the beautifully non-esoteric title Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling our Lives. It was as if a shop assistant had been quietly reading my mind since I strolled in, and had plucked the perfectly titled book off a shelf and strategically laid it on a table I was walking towards. I scooped that thing up and read it cover to cover in the 7-hour flight home. (I never read it again mind you, perhaps something to do with the fact that a few years later I was living and working in Dubai; but that’s a story for another time).
But the choice of airport book is not always successful. On my last pass through Heathrow I picked up a 600-page volume encapsulating a new slant on world history. When exactly did I plan to read that?! It didn’t matter: the airport self-betterment genie had been released and that was that. I can report that I got through the preface and a further 15 pages before I boarded the flight. The 600 pages then transformed before my eyes from a splendid gateway into a world of worthy scholarship into an unwelcome two-inch encroachment into my meagre seat pitch, crowbarred into the seatback pocket. It was an inconvenient memento of a now-passed moment of earnestness, as I spent the flight watching some disposable movies that I can no longer recall the names of.