Chapter XVII of ’To The North’ by Elizabeth Bowen
“A huge blue June day filled the aerodrome and reflected itself in the hall: she heard a great hum from the waiting plane hungry for flight. Such an exalting idea of speed possessed Emmeline that she could hardly sit still and longed to pace to and fro –“
Emmeline and Markie flying from Croydon aerodrome to Paris to meet the two Serbs, and something about that word ‘Serb’ halts me phonetically/ graphically if not semantically, and for a moment I nearly forgot to tell you of the amazing prose in all these adverb powers, including syntactically, as we are literally taken of from the earth in 1930s public air travel and landed back, via the archipelago of clouds, and visual, vibration-feeling and humming-hearing senses, in France, a Zeno speed pent up and expended whilst still in limbo. Probably the greatest few passages of the visionary-sensory (even hindsight SF) that Bowen ever wrote. (Writing ‘Bowen’ there reminds me momentarily of a punny joke someone recently cracked on social media when they saw my current obsessions with her work, a joke about a Bowen 747!)
I could quote the whole chapter, but I won’t.
“…he observed, however, from Emmeline’s face of delight that something had happened: earth had slipped from their wheels that, spinning, rushed up the air. They were off.”
“Close in the strong light and distant in roaring silence her face appeared transparent; watching the thoughts come up like shadows behind it he thought of the Scottish queen’s ill-fated delicate throat, down which, says a chronicler, red wine was seen to run as she drank.”
And a pencilled real time review on paper between them when travelling on the plane, against the deafening sounds, gives a new slant on this review itself!
“…free of that veil of uncertainty and oblivion that falls on the posted letter, the repercussions upon her of all he said. The indiscretions of letter-writing, the intimacies of speech were at once his.”
“Stayed by this feeling of unimmediacy she reviewed one by one the incidents of their friendship, each distinct from the other as cloud from cloud but linked by her sense of something increasing and mounting and, like the clouds, bearing in on her by their succession and changing nature how fast and strongly, though never whither, they moved. She was embarked, they were embarked together, no stop was possible;”
“– pointed a pause in which both felt something gained or lost, though neither, perhaps, knew which.”
It was still a ‘quivering plane’ even while they unboarded it.
“Paris, approached by its macabre north, wore its usual first air of being not quite Paris, or more like Paris than one foresaw.”
“An intense sense of being forced so close to the other as to be invisible,…”
***
Full context of this review: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/874-2/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
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