THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 7THE FAMED WRITERand aviator
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry may be
the title character in Antonio
Iturbe’s THE PRINCE OF THE SKIES
(Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan, 544 pp.,
$28.99),but his camaraderie with
two other pioneering French
pilots is what gets this novel
airborne. That and its celebration
of the sheer joy of flying — of the
raucous adventure of living in an
era when “aviation isn’t an indus-
try; it’s just the audacity of a few
reckless entrepreneurs.”
Iturbe’s narrative, translated
from the Spanish by Lilit Zekulin
Thwaites, takes us back to the
1920s and ’30s, when private
postal air services recruited men
to deliver mail at an ever faster
pace and at ever greater dis-
tances: soaring across the Pyre-
nees and then north from the
Sahara, plotting routes through
the Andes and finally daring to
span the Atlantic from Brazil to
Senegal. These enterprising ex-
ploits draw together an unlikely
trio: Saint-Exupéry, an impover-
ished aristocrat with a growing
literary reputation, a tortured
domestic life and the “air of an
anxious chameleon”; Jean Mer-
moz, a handsome, raffish daredev-
il who commands the attention of
many women but whose easy
liaisons leave him unprepared for
actual love, which he initially
confuses with the flu; and Henri
Guillaumet, an unassuming man
of few words and much courage, a
devoted husband who, when not
in his flight gear, might easily be
mistaken for a grocer.
These three can court danger
for only so long, and the final
portion of Iturbe’s swift-moving
novel charts what seems like an
inevitable downward spiral as
Europe lurches toward a second
world war. What you remember,
though, even as fate catches up
with Saint-Exupéry and his com-
rades, is the exhilaration they’ve
known in the time they’ve spent
aloft. Mermoz explains it best:
“You’re in your plane and it’s as if
they’d placed the world down
below just so you can fly over it.”
THE HEROINE OFMeg Waite Clay-
ton’s THE POSTMISTRESS OF PARIS
(Harper, 416 pp., $27.99)is also a
pilot, but her perilous missions
are conducted on terra firma — in
the city streets and rural villages
of World War II France. In an
author’s note, Clayton explains
that her Nanée was inspired by
the real-life Chicago heiress Mary
Jayne Gold, a devoted Francophile
who used her money, her social
contacts and her American pass-
port to aid Varian Fry, whose
Centre Américain de Secours
smuggled thousands of refugees
to safety.
Clayton’s title is somewhat
misleading. As a “postmistress,”
Nanée does deliver messages to
those in hiding from the Nazis, but
she also strikes out on her own,plotting daring rescue attempts
that will take her to a notorious
internment camp, then deep into
occupied territory. And although
Nanée has a posh Parisian apart-
ment, much of the novel’s action
takes place in and around Mar-
seille, where her rented villa
provides shelter to a cast of char-
acters that includes the Surrealist
icon André Breton and a wholly
fictional photographer, Edouard
Moss.
Edouard is a widower haunted by
the violence he’s seen back in Ger-
many and determined to protect
Luki, his little daughter — a noble
impulse that will inadvertently
result in a long, frightening separa-
tion. The tiny girl seems to have
vanished while her father is stuck in
a French prison camp. Already
romantically drawn to Edouard,
Nanée is equally attracted by hisfierce devotion to his child, so unlike
what she experienced with her own
parents. Might she be able to re-
unite Edouard and Luki and some-
how get them to America? Awaiting
the answer to that question, and
wondering about its impact on
Nanée’s own future, enriches Clay-
ton’s already suspenseful plot.THERE ARE PLENTYof provocative
questions in Oliver Clements’s THE
QUEEN’S MEN (Atria, 416 pp., $27),
the second entry in a lively series
of Elizabethan thrillers. You don’t
need to be familiar with its prede-
cessor to enjoy this account of the
efforts of the Tudor court’s spy-
master, Francis Walsingham, to
protect his monarch from a cun-
ning band of assassins. But those
who’ve already read “The Eyes of
the Queen” will be primed for the
reappearance of Walsingham’s
very reluctant (and very impecu-
nious) agent — the astronomer,
alchemist and bibliophile John
Dee.
A kind of medieval MacGyver,
Dee is presented with a host of
difficult tasks: not just tracing the
bloodthirsty members of the Guild
of the Black Madonna, but con-
ducting experiments with an
incendiary weapon called Greek
fire and dashing off to the coun-
tryside for a possibly treasonous
clandestine operation with a
woman who bears a striking
resemblance to the queen. These
activities will land him, at various
inconvenient times, in the dank
cells of a debtors’ prison, the
teeming wards of Bedlam and the
rat-infested hold of an abandoned
river barge.
Joining in many of these ex-
ploits is a highly placed courtier,
Lady Jane Frommond, whose
efforts to track down the killer of
her pregnant friend will become
entwined with Dee’s investiga-
tions. As will the lady herself, in
what — if the queen’s directive at
the novel’s close is anything to go
by — will be a host of joint foreign
missions. Along the way, Clements
will use what he calls “the bit
parts” and “turning points” of
16th-century English history to
anchor his playful speculations.
“This is the kind of thing that
could have happened,” he writes,
“given the place there and the
time then. Well, maybe.” 0Air Mail
ALIDA BECKERis a former editor at
the Book Review.SIMONE MARTIN-NEWBERRYHISTORICAL FICTION/BY ALIDA BECKERThe firstcookbook fromNew York TimesCookingNo recipes. You don’t need them.“Join me in cooking this new,improvisational way, withoutrecipes.”—Sam Sifton