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Loading... Air from Other Planetsby Andrew Clements
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This magical tale of self-discovery set in the South Pacific charts the adventures of Mark, the most closeted of gay men. He is a hack journalist on a British tabloid local paper, aeroplane spotter and still a virgin at thirty. A chance reading of Robert Louis Stevenson gets him hooked on the South Pacific and he flies 12,000 miles to Samoa in search of his fantasies. No library descriptions found. |
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This may only be Clements' first novel, but he seems a born writer; he has a gift for striking, picturesque description which is perfectly suited to his subject matter - to pick a phrase at random, the beach at Lalomanu is described as "a gently shelving crescent of pure white powdery sand, fringed by huge palm trees that craned languid necks towards the water, the whole cradling a tranquil, translucent and absurdly blue sea". That word "absurdly" perfectly captures Mark's happy disbelief of the world he's just entered, and the reader would have to be made of stone not to be seduced by Clements' use of language. Mark's sexual awakening is also treated sympathetically and with considerable eroticism.
(I've only one complaint, and it's a minor one, namely that the proof-reader at GMP must have been on holiday when this was produced: simple errors of type-setting and spelling mistakes - "it's" for "its", "theirs" for "there's", an absence of commas at the necessary moment - sometimes provide a niggling distraction from the immediate impact of the prose.)
Overall, the lush descriptions, atmosphere and literary references flesh out the slight framework of the "novel of erotic awakening" to provide something really satisfying.
[Note: This review - my own - first appeared on Amazon.co.uk on 29.6.2004] ( )