With minimal personal fanfare, B.C. writer Iain Lawrence has established himself over the past five years as one of Canada’s most intriguing writers for young adults. Like Australian writer Ivan Southall, Lawrence launched his career with action-adventure stories for boys, then segued into darker, more complicated psychological territory.

Lawrence’s latest is the story of a 16-year-old from northern Ontario who lies about his age to enlist in the Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. The action begins with the boy’s arrival at a Yorkshire airfield, where his major concern is to keep his age a secret so he won’t be sent home. This deception becomes a minor concern as the boy, a wireless operator, goes on numerous bombing operations during the spring and summer of 1943. The action ends with him in mid-air, hanging in his parachute somewhere over Berlin. An epilogue tells us that he spent the duration of the war “and of my boyhood” in a prison camp, and then went home, carrying the legacy of a recurring nightmare of falling from the sky.

The boy’s inner journey runs from childish enthusiasm (“Shazam” he exclaims on his first take-off) through paralyzing terror to a kind of suspended, haunted state. In this book, as in his others, Lawrence spins a good yarn, but the real power of his writing lies in his evocation of atmosphere – in the prairie dustiness of Ghost Boy, the salty claustrophobia of The Lightkeeper’s Daughter, the oppressive darkness of Lord of the Nutcracker Men, and the sheer noise and wetness of his High Seas Trilogy. The atmosphere in B for Buster is so real, it’s almost a character. Clouds, stars, darkness, northern lights, moonlight, freezing rain, lightning, St. Elmo’s fire, searchlights, falling bombs, and flaming aircraft – Lawrence creates a world of rich vertical dimension in which each operation is unique and contributes to our cumulative experience of flying. He uses small historical facts to convey larger realities. In case modern air travellers don’t realize how low those bombers were flying, he gives us a lovely sad detail. When the bombers flew over occupied Denmark, the Danes would go into the field with torches and signal “V” in Morse code to cheer the bombers on to victory.

Lawrence’s crisp, taut, rhythmical style perfectly suits this material. In the flight scenes he incorporates historical detail and technical information seamlessly into his plot, never letting the intrinsic fascination of anti-radar devices or propdraft get in the way of the story. In a totally convincing, visceral way, he recreates the heightened emotions of terror and exhilaration that the characters feel under attack. In an appendix Lawrence acknowledges many oral sources of information. He has done a masterful job of incorporating this lore into a recreation of life in the air and in battle.

On the ground, though, this novel feels less assured. On terra firma Lawrence gives in to the temptation of including war lore for its own sake. Here he does a lot of telling, which makes the novel feel too much like a memoir. “Every morning at breakfast” is the stuff of memoir. “That morning at breakfast” is the stuff of fiction. If the fact that flying clothes were called “clobber” could have been slipped into dialogue, that would have added historical flavour and colour, but telling us this undigested lump of fact doesn’t enhance the story.

A more difficult problem is that the emotional underpinning of life on the ground is oddly muted. We never know the real name of the protagonist, who’s called “Kak, the kid from Kakabeka,” nor do we know anything about his background except that his father is a drunk. Lawrence seems to keep him deliberately remote from the reader. I wonder if this is the result of his use of oral testimony. My experience of talking to veterans of the Second World War is that while they can be a rich source of information and stories about the techniques of war and especially about the culture and lore of the military, they have largely cut themselves off emotionally from the reality of having been surrounded by death, and from the ethically disturbing question of bombing civilians. A novel that does not reflect this disconnection would not be authentic.

Lawrence attempts to get around this problem with a subplot involving the use of homing pigeons. In an author’s note he writes about his discovery of this little-known and poignant area of war history. Early in the war a homing pigeon went on each bombing raid and the “pigeoneer” (who cared for the birds) was an essential member of the ground crew. In B for Buster Lawrence uses the character of Bert the pigeoneer, an odd lonely outcast of a man, and the pigeons themselves as Kak’s one emotional outlet. Bert becomes a substitute father, and Percy the pigeon becomes Kak’s one true intimate friend. Even with this ingenious plot strand, however, I still didn’t feel I knew Kak. Because he is my window on this world, and certainly the access point for any young reader, the story remains somewhat emotionally distant.
One of Lawrence’s common themes is loneliness. The last paragraph of this novel echoes the first in the phrase “a lonely airfield among the hills of Yorkshire.” On page one, we think this is a geographical detail. By the last page, we realize that the loneliness is within.