Arthur Hailey (1920–2004)

Lincoln International Airport is in the third day of battling a major snowstorm. Flights are delayed, others are cancelled, the snow-removal crews are working overtime, and one of the runways is blocked by a stuck plane. Meanwhile, whiny NIMBYs who moved into homes built beside the airport are staging a demonstration about the noise, and then of course (of course!) there’s a bomb threat on one of the flagship planes. Alongside this aviation drama is the personal drama involving the airport show more manager, a prestigious pilot, a flight attendant, and an air traffic controller.

For most of this book I was practically bouncing up and down in my seat with glee. All of the nerdy details were FANTASTIC. I LOVED all of it—the snow removal, the aircraft maintenance, the control tower, the competing priorities, the churning foam of activity under the slick veneer of a then-modern airport waiting to join the jet age. I wished my pilot friends were around so I could read entire passages out to them and ask “Is this true? Do they really talk like this? This sounds really accurate.” Arthur Hailey obviously plotted the whole thing very carefully and did his research. It’s very well structured and holds up soundly. It is a LONG book, though, surprisingly for what I expected to be more like a cheap thriller, so you may require more patience than anticipated.

The only thing I wasn’t really crazy about was the storylines involving various sexual shenanigans. Pilot/flight attendant romance? Yawn. One female character being mostly remembered for having a bust visible from space? Come ON. What is this, Airplane!? Actually, the film of this movie and of a previous TV movie of Hailey’s, Flight into Danger, which was eventually adapted into Zero Hour!, were the inspiration for that much-beloved comedy masterpiece. So in a way it helped to roll my eyes at the naughty scenes and write it off as “well, that’s Airplane! for you.”

I’d recommend this if you like well-structured thrillers, or perhaps other air disaster novels with nerdy technical details, such as Michael Crichton’s Airframe. show less

Arthur Hailey is a talented writer, but this novel about a priest turned cop was slow and, at times, almost dull. Some chapters read like a detective manual for beginners. Detective Malcolm Anslie is portrayed as an educated, savvy, and caring public servant with a lovely family, but I found him confusing. In the story, he is a by-the-book detective, yet he sabotages his career by having a yearlong affair with a co-worker who becomes his senior at work. It was difficult for me to reconcile show more his behavior with his character's work ethic. The plot was complicated and far-fetched. Commissioner Cynthia Ernst was damaged yet brilliant, but her simple stupidity became her undoing, which I found unrealistic. show less

I had never read any of Hailey's umpty-million books until I picked up this BookCrossing release. As a novel I give it a “high average” score. I enjoyed it, but was also shocked by it in a way I’m sure the author did not intend.

First things first: This is a medical thriller, with layers of suspenseful subplots that all reach their greatest tension at the same time — a neat trick. It would have worked even better if Hailey hadn’t slipped into prose, late in the book, that sounds show more like it should be intoned by Charlton Heston in a beard and nightgown:

What have we built here? O’Donnell searched his mind. Is it, in truth, a place of healing? Or have we raised, in folly, a whited sepulcher — an empty, antiseptic shrine?

I enjoyed the book’s antiquity: It was published in 1959, so characters ask the local operator to place a call to New York (“Thank you, New York”). The nurses have to live in the “nurse's home,” a dormitory with a curfew. The doctors all pause now and again to light a cigarette and draw the smoke gratefully into their lungs. (It’s still five years until the Surgeon-General’s famous report.)

But here’s what shocked me.

He asked a girl clerk behind the desk, “Which technicians are free?”
She consulted a list. “There’s Jane or Mr. Firban.”
“I think we’ll have Firban do this one. . . .” [208]

Get it? Women in this novel are “girls” who are addressed by their first names. Men are men, and they get a “Mr.” This is true throughout the book: Even a senior surgeon, the only woman on staff, is called “Lucy” (’though I’ll admit she’s at least never called a “girl doctor”).

But what makes this stuff shocking (not just abhorrent) is that it’s also clear that the author is trying his darndest to be modern and to write strong, intelligent, progressive women characters. He even writes little lectures on the subject. Here’s one:

He knew, too, that difference in sex had little to do with it, that women were often stouter than men in mind and heart, and that apparent masculinity was sometimes a hollow pose designed to camouflage internal weakness. [234]

Well and good. Yet Hailey’s strong women, unlike his men, are still subject to incapacitating fits of emotion. And what scares me is, I suspect he’s not just making it up, and that women really were socialized this way, believing it was “natural” to go physically weak with desire for a man — much as women of an earlier era learned to faint, to really lose consciousness, at moments of social stress.

Then there’s the feminine intelligence à la Hailey. We find that an expectant mother, praised by her doctor as “an intelligent girl,” is actually a ponderous thinker. We can tell this because Hailey lets us listen to her thoughts. Here’s how the passage ends: She smiled at that. She guessed she really was intelligent. After all, she had proved she still possessed her old classroom ability to understand and memorize. Then she told herself: Don’t be smug; besides, it’s a baby you’re having, not an end-of-semester exam.

I probably ought to give Hailey some credit for being a good observer. Mrs. John Alexander’s thought process, just cited, is of a kind that was routine in the 1950s and is still with us today. I know because of my mother’s testimony. She was in college then, being trained to understand that girls, no matter how intelligent in their way, did not enter certain professions such as engineering. Who did she think she was, after all — some kind of girl genius? An Alice Einstein? A man?

When I finished the book, I had to give my mother a call. show less

Arthur Hailey, the master of fiction-with-realistic-settings, has taken Canadian politics as the backdrop for In High Places. As can be expected, he has presented the human side of politics with all things good, bad and ugly. Though it is an engaging read right through, for someone who has read and enjoyed most of his works for the inside details that he provides of the industries in which the stories are set, it is somewhat unsatisfying. It feels as if Hailey was on a deadline to finish show more writing this novel. Or else, Canadian politics is, maybe, not as colourful as that of many other nations and, choosing it as the setting, Hailey could do nothing more. That said, I enjoyed this one too, though not as much as I had done his other great works. So it is between 3 and 4 stars, rounded up to 4 due to my bias towards Hailey! show less