The Lost Flying Boat by Alan Sillitoe

First published: 1983

Type of work: Adventure

Time of work: c. 1950

Locale: South Africa, the skies over the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere, and Antarctica

Principal Characters:

• Adcock, the narrator, a wireless radio operator trained in World War II and down on his luck after a failed marriage
• Captain Bennett, the pilot of a flying boat and the organizer of an expedition to recover lost treasure in the Antarctic region
• Rose, the navigator from Bennett’s crew during World War II
• Nash, the chief gunner from Bennett’s wartime crew

The Novel

The Lost Flying Boat has all the ingredients of a high adventure tale: an assemblage of tough characters with distinguished combat service, the lure of lost treasure that drives these men to face both natural and man-made danger, the presence of a domineering and obsessed leader who will sacrifice everything to obtain the gold he seeks, and a scenario of suspense that leaves the reader wondering if the expedition can succeed without costing all the adventurers their lives. Within the framework of this action-packed story, Alan Sillitoe skillfully explores several significant questions concerning human values.

Divided neatly into three parts, the novel chronicles the adventures of a crew of former World War II airmen brought together by their former aircraft commander, Captain Bennett, to search for lost gold in the Antarctic region. The story is told by Adcock, a wireless operator and the only member of the expedition not originally a member of Bennett’s wartime crew. Adcock joins with Bennett for what he views as an opportunity for adventure and a chance to put aside the pain of his recent divorce.

The first part of the work is set in South Africa, where Bennett assembles his crew and provisions the Aldebaran, a huge flying boat that will carry the men to the Kerguelen Islands in the Antarctic Ocean. As far as Adcock can tell, only Bennett knows why the expedition is being mounted, but he soon senses that there may be something both dangerous and illegal in their efforts. As the crew arrives in South Africa, Adcock learns why each has signed on for what many of them sense will be their last mission with Bennett. Some come for the promise of money (though none knows how the money will be obtained); others come simply for the promise of adventure.

As they prepare for their departure, Adcock begins to sense that they are being watched, that someone else is interested in their activities. Not until shortly before they actually take off does Bennett reveal to the crew their destination and purpose: to recover several million dollars in lost gold coins, buried on a remote island in the Antarctic by a German submarine captain before he was captured. Bennett, who had rescued the captain and been with him when he died, now possesses the map that will lead them to the treasure.

The second part of The Lost Flying Boat focuses on the transoceanic flight. Forced to maintain radio silence, Adcock listens intently to the signal traffic as Bennett and crew guide the flying boat with great precision to their foreboding destination. Suspense is heightened when, in mid-flight, the four former gunners who are along for reasons Adcock has only suspected until now, break out machine guns and mount them in the flying boat’s turrets. Meanwhile, from the radio traffic, Adcock begins to verify his suspicions that another party is after the gold. Bennett directs the wireless operator to send false signals to a ship that seems to be insistent on communicating with them; Adcock, wincing under the moral dilemma of using his trade to perpetrate falsehood, complies. With expertise that Adcock begrudgingly admires, Bennett maneuvers the huge flying machine into the narrow fjord on the island where the gold is buried. The plane alights in the water, and the men begin the most dangerous part of the expedition: extricating the treasure and escaping before their competitors arrive.

In the final section of the novel, the tenuous bonds that have held this group together begin to unravel as the crew searches for and finally discovers the gold. While they search, they hear the ominous sounds of another plane, clearly looking for them. Bennett expertly directs a shore party of which Adcock is a member to locate the gold, dig it up, and haul the boxes of coins to the water. During this operation, however, one of the gunners wanders away; he is found later at the bottom of a cliff, torn apart by sea birds. Upon returning to the boat, the shore party discovers that Wilcox, the engineer, has drowned. Once the gold is aboard, Adcock contacts the supply ship that is to rendezvous with them to refuel the flying boat. Meanwhile, another gunner slips away. The depleted crew accomplishes the refueling, but while they wait for the foul weather to break, they learn by means of the wireless that the supply ship has come under attack and has been seized. In a daring display of aerial heroics, Bennett manages to lift the flying boat out of the fjord while under fire from the guns of the ship that has done away with the supply vessel. An aerial dogfight ensues between scout planes from this enemy ship and the flying boat, and the crew of the Aldebaran are finally forced to choose between the dangerous alternative of flying a damaged plane with the full load of gold or jettisoning the precious cargo to save their lives.

The group finally disintegrates: The navigator, Rose, kills himself; the chief gunner, Nash, and Bennett argue over jettisoning the gold to save their lives, and both meet their ends through a series of killings that finally cause the aircraft to crash, leaving Adcock as the lone survivor. After several days, he is picked up by a passing ship and lives to relate this tale twenty-five years later.

The Characters

Two characters dominate this novel: the wireless operator, Adcock, who narrates the story, and the flying boat’s pilot and captain, Bennett. Through them, and through the minor characters in this narrative, Sillitoe explores the motivations that drive men to act in a world devoid of meaning.

Sillitoe’s narrator is a curious combination of observer and quester. Trained to be a listener at his wireless set, Adcock is also a listener in a larger sense: He takes in what others tell him about themselves, about their experiences, about their hopes, desires, and frustrations; he sifts it in his own mind as he tries to make sense of human experience. Isolated from the world in several ways—a recent divorcee, a man without steady employment—he hires on with a strange captain and crew for an adventure whose purpose is only vaguely clear to him. The fact that the other members of the flying boat crew all served together under Bennett only serves to heighten Adcock’s isolation. Through him, Sillitoe is able to introduce the reader obliquely to this clandestine world of piracy and lawlessness—a world that stands in microcosm for the larger, postwar world.

Like many of Sillitoe’s other heroes, Adcock is painfully alone in a world that appears as a jungle, where individuals act from personal motives, for reasons that are difficult to fathom. Through Adcock, the reader learns something of the motives that drive men on the fringes of modern society to act as they do. Adcock’s frustrations help the reader to see the immense difficulty modern man has in trying to make sense of a world in which individual freedom is virtually impossible and in which dreams are casually shattered either by the malicious plans of others or by some impersonal force of nature.

In contrast to Adcock stands Bennett, the one character who has a clear purpose and who is willing to sacrifice anything, even his own life, to achieve it. Bennett’s monomaniacal pursuit of the buried treasure drives him to use others without thought as to the consequences of his actions. His expedition is really an attempt to escape from society; it is a journey toward freedom. Through him, Sillitoe explores the paradoxical nature of freedom in the modern world. Bennett feels free only when he is cooped up in his plane, away from the constraints of society, a master of the little world in which he is captain, and, in essence, judge and jury over those under his command. One gets the sense that the challenge of the expedition is as important to him as the success of the mission, largely because he is in control of events.

The supporting cast for this story is also noteworthy. All the crew members have suffered in some way since the war’s end, and this expedition will give them a chance to recapture some of the excitement that the war provided; all hope that this trip will restore some meaning to their lives, giving them a sense of purpose that they have not felt since they flew missions for the Royal Air Force. The navigator, Rose, first appears with a huge scar across his face—a visible sign of the psychological damage the war has inflicted on him and, by extension, on the other members of the crew. A man of great technical competence, he maintains an intense loyalty to his captain and is devastated when he learns that at some point Bennett may find him expendable. The prospect of the imminent failure of the adventure finally leads him to commit suicide. In contrast, Nash, the chief gunner, is a man of action who is also loyal to the captain but who values life over the success of the expedition. Adcock’s attempt to figure them out lends complexity to the story and dramatizes the difficulties of human communication.

Critical Context

Sillitoe has long been considered a “proletarian novelist,” one primarily concerned with figures from the lower classes of society or those living on its fringes. The Lost Flying Boat fits that mold only partially. The major characters are out of the mainstream, and the action of the novel takes place far from the center of civilization. Nevertheless, the extraordinary setting does not disguise the universality of the plight in which these characters find themselves. Metaphysical questions enter into the discussions of even these hardboiled men of action; the novel is as much a part of the tradition of the novel of ideas as it is of the adventure-story genre to which its fast-paced plot connects it.

The novel also has distinct echoes of works within the great tradition of Western literature. One can find striking parallels between this story of men in pursuit of treasure and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”; in fact, the plot lines are remarkably similar. The journey to the Antarctic by a crew that had once won glory and that is reassembled for one last voyage recalls the story of Ulysses as told by Dante in The Divine Comedy (c. 1320): It is a voyage toward death. Finally, the two major characters, Adcock and Bennett, share many similarities with Herman Melville’s Ishmael and Captain Ahab from Moby Dick (1851). The final scene of the novel, when Adcock, the sole survivor of the expedition, is picked up by a passing ship, is only the most obvious of several points at which this novel and Melville’s classic seem akin. These references give Sillitoe’s work additional impact for the reader familiar with the literary tradition.

Bibliography

Atherton, Stanley S. Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment, 1979.

Best Sellers. XLIV, November, 1984, p. 290.

Kirkus Reviews. Review. LII (July 1, 1984), p. 598.

Library Journal. Review. CIX (September 15, 1984), p. 1774.

Listener. CX, December 15, 1983, p. 30.

London Review of Books. Review. V (November 17,1983), p. 12.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. LXXXIX (October 14, 1984), p.26.

Penner, Allen Richard. Alan Sillitoe, 1972.

The Observer. November 6, 1983, p. 31.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. November 11, 1983, p. 1256.