Czesław Miłosz expressed that in poetry, he was not trying to escape from fear but to show that fear and reverence can coexist. Rebecca Loncraine recounts in her memoir Skybound how flying in a glider helped her confront breast cancer. She demonstrates that one can rise above the fear of death both literally and through exquisitely beautiful language.
Loncraine’s fascination with soaring in the sky started in her early years on the family farm in the Black Mountains of Wales, inspired by The Wizard of Oz. After completing her literature doctorate at the University of Oxford, she explored tornadoes in America and wrote a celebrated biography of L. Frank Baum. From my time at Oxford with her, I admired how she seamlessly integrated scholarly research into her creative work, giving her writing a focused and deeply emotional quality. In Skybound, her second book, she delves into the history of engineless flight dating back to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches in the Codex on the Flight of Birds, including his concept of an “ornithopter,” a machine with flapping wings. Loncraine takes us on a journey through the skies, from her childhood home to New Zealand and Nepal, returning to a burnt hillside near her farm.
From various altitudes, gliding beneath magnificent birds and soaring above unexplored mountain peaks, Loncraine masterfully crafts a language to map her suffering. The view of the Alps resembles an MRI scan on a flight map, while a burnt hillside near her childhood home mirrors her breast post radiation therapy. Viewing her early-life landscape from above offers new emotional and visual perspectives. Memories of her youth in the garden and hills, surrounded by birdsong, resurface as she glides above sheep and horses, understanding her family home’s place within the larger landscape and seeing mountains and glaciers like seals’ backs.
As a dedicated scholar, Loncraine delves into the geography of the regions she flies over, studying local communities’ relationship with the environment, flora, fauna, rivers, lakes, winds, and clouds. On the ground, she morphs into a botanist, identifying flowers, herbs, and grasses that paint the landscape. Through her glider journeys, she experiences a diverse world with Bo, her flight instructor, navigating clouds and turbulent winds. But even amid turbulence, the thrill of being fully alive shines through, as Loncraine feeds a vulture mid-flight in Nepal, feeling the rush of the sky’s currents.
The language of flight becomes Loncraine’s way of discussing the harsh effects of cancer and the challenging treatments that forced her to confront dread and reverence simultaneously. She describes circling over a mountain to grasp fear’s elusive nature, flying with instruments obscured to rely on her body’s instincts in the sky’s mysteries. Her accounts of lessons and flights blend practicality with poetry, likening soaring to mastering an instrument, requiring discipline, precision, practice, and unwavering commitment. Eventually, flying feels fluid and seamless, as if the sky has intertwined with her very being.
Skybound transcends being solely for cancer patients, offering solace and inspiration during difficult treatments. At its core, the book celebrates the sheer joy of belonging to the extraordinary earth we share, penned by a remarkably perceptive and talented author. Loncraine’s vivid imagery and childlike elation while airborne echo Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, reminding us of the joy of journeying with nature. In the book’s final passages, Loncraine peacefully sleeps at home under the stars, her mind blending the dawn chorus into a river of birdsong as she drifts into slumber, leaving behind a lasting literary legacy cherished by her family and editor.
