Joan Barfoot’s novels – like her last book, Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch – deal with a breed of women better suited to independence than domesticity. In Some Things About Flying she continues her variations on this theme with Lila, a single and non-celibate academic in her mid-40s, involved with Tom, a married man in his 50s. Both are flying to a conference in England that will provide the cover for the first holiday together in their five-year liaison. Strapped into economy class, anticipating, Lila thinks back over the events in her life and Tom’s that have brought them to this happy point. Suddenly things begin to go very wrong – and anyone who has ever huddled in a window seat scrutinizing a plane’s wings for weaknesses can imagine what form the disastrous turn takes.

Barfoot has been publishing novels successfully since 1978; her first, Abra, won the Books in Canada first novel prize. In 1992 she was the winner of the Marian Engel award, given to a woman writer at mid-career, and she has her own loyal readers, especially women. Her prose is efficient, controlled, and at times a little glib. Here, it skirts close to banality after takeoff as the lovers ignore the safety demonstrations and titillate each other with fantasies of airplane-washroom sex – yet all this acquires ironic shadings once things get dire. The story is tautly structured; flashbacks allow the reader only brief escapes from the airplane cabin. While the prospect of spending most of the book in a plane could induce literary claustrophobia in those not fond of flying, in the last pages Barfoot carries both her readers and Lila much further than they bargained for. As the book hits its stride in the final chapters, in addition to some things about flying, it makes some insightful points about love and life. Especially vivid is the image of a civilization meeting its destiny hurtling forward into oblivion at great speed, seatbelts tightly fastened, eyes locked on a second-rate film on a flickering screen.