Proyectos

Icarus

A novel by Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa

Synopsis

Vázquez-Figueroa is a Spanish best-seller, a prolific novelist of (mainly) adventure stories, often set in exotic locations and made into powerful films. In recent years his writing has shown an increasing tendency to center on real-life characters/events not fully documented at the time and therefore leaving scope for speculation about what really happened. His latest novel, Icarus, is no exception to this pattern.

It is the story of a man and a dream. The man is Jimmie Angel, pioneer of the early days of aviation: First World War pilot, personal pilot to Lawrence of Arabia, squadron member with the legendary aviator Roland Garros, escort pilot for emerald dealers, courier for nitroglycerin delivery to burning oil wells, circus stunt pilot, and quite probably the most skilled pilot of his times; in short, if it could be done in an airplane, Jimmie Angel had done it or was soon to do it. His dream, to land for the second time on the summit of a tepui (flat-topped tabular mountain) in the remote Guiana Highlands of South America, where he believes he will find a treasure of gold and diamonds bequeathed him by an explorer friend dying of cancer.

The action opens somewhere in the Guiana jungle, where two exhausted explorers, McCraken and Williams, who've spent years in the jungle, have found gold and diamonds atop a high tepui and stumbled upon the highest waterfall in the world, though without knowing it is such. The unfortunate death in an accident of his bosom buddy Williams causes McCraken to give up the exploring life, though not his resolve (when his finances begin to run low) to return to the tepui to bring back more of the gold and diamonds the pair had discovered earlier.

And that is where Jimmie Angel enters the story, hired by McCraken to fly him to the treasure mountain, land on top of it and in return receive a fee and a cut of the treasure for himself. His airplane is a Bristol Piper which - like most of the machines he flies in the course of his career - has seen better days; the mission itself, like most that truly interest him, is highly dangerous and calls for consummate flying skills. The two men nevertheless achieve their goal and return safe and sound, their mutual respect only increased.

Eleven years are to pass before Jimmie Angel and John McCraken meet again by chance on a train, during which time Angel's passion for flying and for hazardous new ventures has grown. McCraken breaks the news that he has terminal cancer, and bequeaths his mine to Jimmie Angel. In the face of opposition from his wife, Virginia, Angel sets off for Venezuela in the company of Dick Curry, a friend of his without previous adventuring experience, in a second-hand Gypsy Moth. The trip is ill-fated and they are finally forced to abandon the problematic airplane. Curry stays in Venezuela, while Angel returns to the United States to raise money for another airplane to make a fresh attempt on the mountain, which he only does two years later, with Curry by then disappeared and presumed dead. Angel is now at the controls of the superior Tiger Moth. It is in the course of this expedition that he discovers the world's highest waterfall (over 3,000 feet high), which is named Angel Falls after him.

By now in his mid-thirties, Jimmie Angel is a somewhat less impetuous character, though still with most of his earlier boyish enthusiasm intact. Fifteen years have passed since that first mountain-top landing with McCraken. With financial assistance from well-wishing fellow explorers and pilots Jimmie Angel, in the company of his second wife Mary, a famous Spanish pilot and two Venezuelan climbers, land on the mountain he (wrongly) believes to be the one concealing McCraken's treasure. The airplane is irreparably damaged by the landing, however, and the four who landed on the mountain (leaving the Spaniard down at the base camp) make an agonizing descent which brings them within a whisker of death, only to be rescued and brought down the last seemingly impassable section of the mountain by some local Indians.

The novel is clearly an action novel, full of spills and thrills. But it is rather more than that. The authors lays great emphasis on the bonds of friendship and love between man and man (McCraken and Williams, Angel and Cardona the Spaniard) and man and woman (Angel and his second wife, Mary). We also find, skillfully handled in narrative form, some of the ecological concerns that begin to creep into Vázquez-Figueroa's more mature works.

As is often the case in action-packed novels, character portrayal is as times sketchy. But the characters are in any case subservient to the action, and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that even the action is subservient to the natural backdrop against which it takes place: the Guiana jungle and highlands of South America. The author seems at times to be engaged in an attempt to set down in words what would perhaps be more naturally the preserve of film in the hands of the great producers of this world. More strongly than any of his previous works, Vázquez-Figueroa's latest novel "Icarus" cries out to the film-maker, who would doubtless find in it spectacular subject-matter easy to visualize in cinematographic terms but by no means so easy to produce. The glove of challenge has been hurled down!.

volver a proyectos