Book Title:  Landing (Fiction)

Author:  Emma Donoghue

Publishing Company:  Harcourt, Inc.

Year:  2007

# of Pages: 324

ISBN #:  978-0-15-101297-8

$25.00 

3 Stars 

Reviewer:  Deborah Ground Buckner 

Author Emma Donoghue's historical novels Hood (1995) and Slammerkin (2000) have received the Stonewall Book Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction, respectively.  Her latest work, Landing, takes on a contemporary setting, with characters in a long-distance relationship dependent on e-mail, telephone and trans-Atlantic flights. 

Jude Turner, in her mid-20s, is living in Ireland, Canada, with her mother and operating a small museum with a virtually non-existent budget.  When her mother flies to England to visit a sister, Jude's holidays are interrupted by a call from her aunt advising her to come to fly home with her mother.  Jude boards an airplane for the first time in her life, and the elderly man seated next to her dies mid-Atlantic.  Finishing off her flight beside a corpse, Jude engages in conversation with a concerned flight attendant, Sile O'Shaughnessy.  Sile is a beautiful woman of Indian-Irish descent who is approaching 40 and caught up in a rather meaningless life in Dublin between flights.   

Within a month, Jude's mother is dead from a fast-growing brain tumor.  Jude and Sile begin an e-mail correspondence (Jude is such a Luddite her only Internet access is through the museum's computer) which leads to a romance and both making cross-Atlantic flights to visit each other in their own environments. 

This is a book that is character-, and not plot-driven.  Donoghue's development of her characters is thorough and effective; the problem is that none of the characters come across as particularly likable.  Sile's cosmopolitan life with her married couple friends (the wife is secretly having an affair with a woman) and her gay friend, Marcus, with his new, albeit cheating partner, Pedro, seems shallow, empty and mindless.  It is difficult to see what attraction she and the rural, rugged, denim-clad history-minded Jude ever have for each other.  Jude's not-quite-ex-husband, Rizla, is crass, obnoxious and far-too-present in the story.   There is a certain stereotyping of each character that is somewhat surprising in a story told by a gay author.  

Each titled chapter begins with a literary quotation that sets the mood for the events of the chapter.  These are beautifully chosen and provide a nice literary feel.  The e-mails between Jude and Sile, a device rich with potential, often come across flat and uninteresting, again, making it difficult to see the necessary level of passion.  This is a relationship that begins and grows through e-mail and telephone calls; there should be more spark, more development of closeness present in their words to each other. 

Two thirds of the way through the book, the story begins to bog.  It is evident Jude and Sile have to break up or get together in one location, but the reader may end up not caring what they do.  Though the book is billed as “an old-fashioned love story with a uniquely twenty-first-century twist,” it is difficult to get excited about this couple who seem woefully mismatched.