<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\n Since I don't know how up to speed you are on the breed, I can't say for sure whether Britain's Derek Robinson is the best war novelist you've never heard of. The odds are pretty good he's the coolest, though.\n\n He's so unknown Stateside that he'd probably run into difficulties trying to get a good table at a Burger King. But this ornery writer has been turning out unfashionable, spellbinding, sardonically funny novels about 20th-century aerial combat ever since 1971's Goshawk Squadron, an acridly anti-heroic tale of dogfights and home-base squabbles set during the hairiest days of World War One.\n\n In Robinson's big brush with A-list literary prestige, his debut got short-listed that year for the U.K.'s renowned Booker Prize. The author isn't shy about reminding people that he'd have won if one of the judges\u2014future Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow\u2014had had his way. Yet out of such near misses are cult writers born.\n\n Now 80, Robinson has hardly slowed down. A Splendid Little War, his latest \"ripping yarn\"\u2014his own cheerful description\u2014about not-so-magnificent men in their flying machines, came out from the MacLehose Press just last month. But the larger cause for celebration is that MacLehose is also reprinting Robinson's earlier novels about the WW2 Royal Air Force and its primitive WW1 predecessor, the Western Front's Royal Flying Corps.\n\n That means the fans who've been tempted to spend big bucks for rare copies of, say, Hornet's Sting (part of his WW1 cycle) or A Good Clean Fight (the RAF vs. the Afrika Korps in WW2) can finally breathe easy. There may not be many of us, but we're glued for life. I've been crazy about Robinson ever since a friend introduced me years ago to Goshawk Squadron, no doubt cackling at how hooked he knew I'd get. It's an ongoing mystery to us addicts why our hero isn't as well known as his salt-water equivalent, Patrick O'Brian, whose Aubrey-Maturin series does the same thing for the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars\u2014or, in my case, did until I got bored with it.\n\n Robinson, on the other hand, I stick with through thick and thin. Though A Splendid Little War isn't in a league with his masterpiece, Piece of Cake undoubtedly the best novel anybody will ever write about 1940's Battle of Britain\u2014it's an improvement on Hullo Russia, Goodbye England, his most recent flight-centric novel. (As a rule, the Cold War stimulates the satirist in him, but not the poet.) The new one takes us back to 1919, when a few unlucky veterans of the War to End All Wars\u2014some joke, right?\u2014got recruited to fly and die during the West's forgotten, ill-advised intervention in the civil war between the Bolsheviks and their old-regime enemies in post-revolutionary Russia.\n\n They don't know what they're doing there, familiar Robinson turf. The blithe but soon calloused, embittered and/or disemboweled young men he writes about rarely know what they're doing anywhere, bed included. If the vestigial romantic in him admires their eagerness to learn both in the sky and between the sheets, the cynic in him never shrinks from killing them off midway through their education. Even Joseph Heller never did better at conveying the absurdity of war via sudden announcements that this or that character we're grown invested in has just been butchered out of the blue\u2014very rarely heroically, far more often thanks to their own idiocy or somebody else's snafu.\n\n Nothing captures Robinson's attitude toward combat like the ending of Piece of Cake, which spends almost 700 pages taking a bevy of fighter pilots through the \"Phony War\" and the Battle of Britain. Then the storyline stops cold just as a couple of them start tangling with some German planes during a huge raid on London: \"Then they were through the net and hacking at the bombers' flanks,\" is this monumental book's utterly matter-of-fact last sentence. We aren't informed of the outcome; we don't have a clue whether the flyers involved will live or die. Robinson has simply told us everything he thinks we need to know about them, and so much for that.\n\n Though he's not a pilot himself\u2014his own very droll website informs us that his long-ago RAF service was resolutely earthbound\u2014Robinson's descriptions of aerial warfare are uncannily vivid when it comes to putting readers in the cockpit (and sometimes meeting a bad end when they're barely off the ground). His flying novels brim with authentic-sounding info about misjudged tactics, beginner mistakes and the properties of particular planes. While you may not trust yourself to fly a Sopwith Camel after reading his World War I books, you will feel alarmingly confident about your ability to explain what makes one different from a Nieuport or a Spad. As with O'Brian's descriptions of Napoleonic seamanship, the reason none of this stuff ever feels like the result of mere research is that it's a matter of life or death to his characters, and you're learning it from inside their heads.\n\n He does have his vices, true. One is the way his unwillingness to ever put the brakes on his gift for thinking up smartass banter by the yard can end up making everybody sound too clever by half. Since he's no good at writing women\u2014but keeps being drawn to try, like a teenager waiting for a centerfold to spout love poetry\u2014he's also guilty of inventing some of the most ridiculous love interests in war fiction since Ernest Hemingway kicked the bucket. Featuring a winsome nurse with an even more arch taste in date gab than Robinson's norm, the one in A Splendid Little War is so silly that you wonder if it's meant as deliberate parody.\n\n That's all fairly trivial, however. Robinson's books go down like popcorn, but they stay with you a lot longer. On top of that, he's prolific as all get-out, with a roster of lesser novels including a satiric series about a double agent named Luis Cabrillo\u2014based on a real spy code-named \"Garbo\"\u2014who goes from making a killing in World War II (The Eldorado Network) to one-upping Joe McCarthy in 1950s Washington (Red Rag Blues). &amp;amp;#xC2; Those are plenty of fun, but the RAF and RFC cycles are Robinson's great ones, and having them all available again is some of the best news of the year. So do your bit to make him famous in his old age."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/notes-from-the-culture-bunker-a-splendid-little-aerial-combat-novelist>