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Although the Battle of Britain was a great British victory, other nationalities played a critical role, particularly the Polish and Czech fliers, who after the defeats of their own countries had flown to England to continue the fight against Hitler. Homage to these fighters, and to the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) who operated the radar equipment, forms a central feature of Andrew Greig's (1951- ) novel The Clouds Above (2001). In fact, the entire novel is a paean, as its dedication puts it, to "the vanishing generation." Opening with a poetic evocation of the period, the paradoxically beautiful summer of 1940, the novel then takes the form of alternating diary-like entries by its two protagonists, Stella Gardam, a WAAF radar operator, and Len Westbourne, an RAF pilot. Their romance is paralleled by that of their best friends Maddy, a nurse, and Tad, a Polish pilot, both of whom are life-loving, rule-breaking free spirits, teaching the more cautious Stella and Len to wrench life from the jaws of death. Tad, the most skilled and daring fighter in Len's squadron, is the epitome of what Len terms "regardless," the defining characteristic of the true fighter pilot. But Tad's seemingly carefree approach sits atop a barely suppressed rage against the Nazis who murdered his father.
The aerial dogfights have a powerful immediacy, often as brief as lightning in the night, creating a more vivid effect with language than the many dogfight scenes in films of the period. Nor is Stella exempt from danger as the German planes increasingly target radar stations. Staring at the blips on her radar screen, she suddenly hears "a curious howling wail. Then the screen went blank, the floor rose and the walls leaned in. [She] saw the major lift and fly across the room. Then the air imploded and [she] was deaf and saw the room soundlessly turn gray with smoke and dust." Similarly powerful is Stella's description of the bombing of a London nightclub, in which Maddy is killed. The presence of death confers on the lovers a depth and maturity that deepens their relationship. Forged in the crucible of war, in a period of two months, their passion achieves the solidity and permanence of a long marriage. Love and death are the basic elements of romantic tragedy, but Greig writes not in a tragic mode but in a celebratory one. He makes this clear in an authorial "Last Word," in which we learn that Stella is modeled on the author’s mother, "now finally gone into the silence to join the rest of her vanishing generation, whose code was sacrifice and whose quest was a decent normality, though it was one that never quite existed. Who were so baffled by our turning away from what they made." Greig's achievement was admirably summarized in the London Times review of the novel: "The Battle of Britain may be rightly regarded as the most famous air conflict in history, but Greig has made it something much more important for a generation now almost unimaginably removed: he has made it real."
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