Benjamin Johncock

The story of test pilot Jim Harrison and his wife, Grace, plays out against the backdrop of the early X-plane test flights and the beginnings of the American space program. Compelling and suspenseful, the story focuses on relationship, expectation, loss, and grief. Both Jim and Grace are flawed, realistic characters fitting perfectly into the backdrop of the history that defines the narrative.

Depicting events from the perspective of both the men and their wives gives the story an added show more complexity and highlights the intricacies of relationships in the day-to-day lives of families. Snappy dialogue and realistic dynamics between characters adds another dimension of believability.

The seamless interplay of the fictional Jim Harrison with the courageous test pilots who flew over the dry lake beds in the Mojave and with the first groups of astronauts gives the story strong credibility. And the inclusion of accounts of true events such as Yeager’s use of the broom handle to fit into the door handle to close the cockpit door provides even greater authenticity as it pulls the reader into the narrative.

Well-crafted and beautifully drawn, this is a story readers will be hard-pressed to set aside before turning the final page.

Highly recommended. show less

How could I not read this? A test pilot at Muroc Air Force Base (later renamed Edwards) in the late 1940s becomes an astronaut in the Apollo programme. This is exactly the same ground I covered in All That Outer Space Allows, although I did it from the wife’s point of view. And my take is a lot more technical. As far as I can determine, Johncock’s Jim Harrison takes the place of Dave Scott (Apollo 15 commander), although Scott does actually appear toward the end of the book. Also, while show more many aspects of Harrison’s persona life are invented, many incidents assigned to Harrison actually happened to others. Harrison is there when Yeager breaks the Sound Barrier in 1947, he gets assigned to the X-15 program and then to the X-20 program, before eventually joining NASA and becoming an Apollo astronaut. Also like All That Outer Space Allows, The Last Pilot focuses on its protagonist’s marriage. Although Harrison and his wife try for children for years, they’re not successful – but then, against all odds, as is usually the case in fiction, they have a girl. But she sickens and dies of cancer at the age of ten, and her death slowly tears the marriage apart from within. If lit fic is unfairly characterised as fiction about middle-class marriages disintegrating, then The Last Pilot is lit fic – albeit with a test pilot/astronaut as its protagonist. It is well-researched, well-written, and Johncock cleverly covers plenty of ground by assigning so many documented incidents to his protagonist. But – and I can actually say this: it’s not the book I would have written. And my own novel coloured my reading of Johncock’s – almost certainly unfairly. It’s a good piece of work, certainly – but I would have preferred something a little more interesting as the plot’s engine… And lots more technical detail. show less

I received a free copy of this e-book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This extraordinary debut work took me very much by surprise. One thing you need to understand before getting into this book is that the author does not use any quotation marks. This almost threw me off, but I was determined to overlook this seemingly odd choice. The lack of quotation marks did make it hard sometimes to determine who was saying what at times. That, coupled with the fact that he took an show more original character and made him one of the New Nine astronaut group had the potential to drive me crazy. The replacement of historic characters with new characters drives me crazy (a la Voyage by Stephen Baxter), but I learned to love it. It seems that Harrison has replaced Eliot See, the only New Nine astronaut to die before he flew.

With such simple text, the author was able to draw vivid pictures of the pilots and astronauts who are icons of the early space age. Some of the dialog seemed right on, as if I could actually hear Pete Conrad joking with the main character. Everyone (Deke, Lovell, Conrad, Grissom, etc.) seemed so true to life. It was truly an experience to see how well the author rendered these characters. There may have been some minor nit-picky technical and historical mistakes, but nothing that the average reader would notice. Mr. Johncock has created something special here.

I primarily read this for the astronaut angle, but I really did enjoy the relationship and conflict between Harrison and his wife. Watching both go into very different grief spirals made this emotionally gut-wrenching at times. I would recommend this to almost anyone. show less

When World War II comes to an end, Jim Harrison stays in the Air Force as a test pilot, pushing the sound barrier in the Mojave Desert. After struggling for years to have children, Jim and his wife Grace are thrilled by the birth of their daughter and happily embrace the changes she brings to their lives. But just as the Space Race begins and the country turns its attention to pilots like Jim, a tragedy strikes the Harrison family and drastically alters the future course.

"You know, she said, show more we went to this party, the year before, I think, old friend of mine; she'd moved east, New York, after the war. She was a journalist, worked at Time and a bunch of other places, then managed to get a job copywriting for one of those big advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. She spent the whole evening telling me how ruthless it was, how cutthroat and dog-eat-dog. I asked her how many of those men would still go into a meeting if there was a one-in-four-chance of them not making it out alive. We lost sixty-two men over a thirty-six-week stretch once. That's nearly two a week. I had to buy another black dress; I couldn't get the one I had clean and dried in time. So I had two, on rotation."

It sounds like a straightforward, even familiar story, but The Last Pilot has incredible surprises hiding between its pages. In the middle of a testosterone-fueled desert, Johncock brings several extremely real, multi-dimensional female characters to life, though they could have easily been pushed aside to make room for another famous pilot. Along with Grace, we meet Pancho Barnes, a fiercely plucky pilot and bar owner with a wicked mouth who isn't afraid to show love when it's most needed. Even the Harrison's daughter, Florence, is a little fireball of precocious energy with a sweet, curious spirit.

And we come to know these characters not in pages-long descriptions, but through conversations and even the silences between them. The absence of quotation marks takes adjusting, but the stylistic choice makes sense in a dialogue-heavy novel. Johncock's words soon play out like the script for a film so deftly written that the expressions of actors seem unnecessary. The Last Pilot will certainly be compared to books like The Right Stuff, which is one of several titles listed as a resource, but despite Johncock's incredible research, this is not a book about the Space Race or even the pilots themselves. It's a story about love and loss, and the all-consuming fears capable of changing our lives.

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