Q&A with Barbara Adair, Author of Will, the Passenger Delaying Flight

Book Description:

Getting out of Europe is the only thing on Volker’s mind when he buys a one-way ticket to Africa. The 24-hour layover is less than ideal.

Stuck in Charles de Gaulle airport, Volker waits, thinks, and observes. Around him, a strange cast of actors moves across the stage: a porn star, a child trafficker, a terrorist with dwarfism, a trans woman, a pedophile, a disgraced professor. As he walks the terminal, Volker contemplates their fates, his own, and the fate of the lover he left behind.

Innovative and subversive, rich with humor and wit, Will, the Passenger Delaying Flight flips the novel form inside out to expose the messy, dreamlike quality of transient spaces—and to memorialize with awe and reverence the people who move us and move past us with nothing but a glance.

Lufthansa, the airline that carries him stops at Charles de Gaulle airport and here he waits and waits and waits. And in the airport he observes and describes and thinks. The text is a stream of consciousness, Volker’s thoughts. Interspersed with this are stories of people he encounters in the airport; a murderer, a terrorist, a person with dwarfism, a trans woman, a porn star, a terrorist, a child trafficker, a paedophile. All are connected, with each other, with Volker and with us, the readers.

Adair’s novel is innovative in form, self-conscious and self-critical; it challenges conventional Western assumptions that all good novels have a clear story line, a good plot and fully rounded characters.

Buy the book here. Author Bio: Barbara Adair is a novelist and writer. In Tangier we Killed the Blue Parrot was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award in 2004. Her novel End was shortlisted for Africa Regional Commonwealth Prize. She contributed to Queer Africa and Queer Africa 2, and her writing, particularly her travel writing, has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. She is currently working with the Wits Writing Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand. www.barbara-adair.co.za 

What was the main inspiration behind Will the Passenger Delaying Flight?

I was travelling in Namibia and stayed with my travelling companion’s friend, Volker. He was German, and about sixty. He told me that he wanted to get out of Germany, and so bought a one way ticket to Namibia. On the way, he had a forty-eight hour layover in Charles de Gaulle airport. This is how he got to Namibia. Then later I was travelling to Paris and had to spend time in Charles de Gaulle airport. Volker’s story came back to me, and I knew that this was a novel.

His journey takes him through Charles de Gaulle airport, but it could be any airport. Here he encounters different people: an academic who has been fired for plagiarism, a trans woman, a person with dwarfism who is a terrorist but who has no cause he does it for money, a homeless man who has been living in the airport for years and has had a movie made about him directed by Steven Spielberg with Tom Hanks as him, a Bulgarian porn star, a man who believes he is Peter Beard but who works in a shop, a child trafficker and more.

I found your use of footnotes throughout the novel really interesting. Can you talk about the decision to incorporate them and how you think they affect the reader’s journey through the story? For me, they add to the excitement of the book. The constant stream of relevant or irrelevant, reverent or irreverent, information. The reader is always intrigued, not only by the story, but by these snippets of information which they are unlikely to be aware of. In addition to this the reader is forced to concentrate on the text. She cannot just skim it for a coherent one sided story.

The book seems to be in constant conversation with other forms of media, literature, and cultural references. How did you decide what conversations to incorporate, and what drew you to weaving these elements into the novel?

They just came to me as I was writing. Maybe I had read something, or seen something, or heard something. There was no conscious decision to incorporate any of them.

But clearly I have been influenced by what I read; for instance, I once read something by Zadie Smith who says this about satire, and I think the novel is a satirical novel: does satire create otherness? She then asks the question: aren’t we all othered just in the way our stories are told? There is only one version of the other, and this may be us.

The novel is written in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness style, as an inner monologue of Volker, which challenges more traditional fiction narratives. Can you talk about your decision to write in this way? Was it a style specific to this novel, or is it a form of writing you enjoy exploring in your other work as well?  I have never used it before, but I think I might have been reading Will Self’s Umbrella, which is written like this, so was inspired to do so myself. It is a modernist way of writing, and here with a post-modern bent. Hence also the title. In fact, the original working title was ‘I Wanna be Will Self’. And I like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses.

The novel is propelled more by character development than by action, allowing readers’ glimpses into many different lives, worlds, and perspectives. Can you talk about your process for creating and developing these characters and capturing their differences?  I don’t have a process. They just came to me, and I worked and worked on creating them. Day after day, for a long time, they were my companions.

 Did you have a favorite character to spend time with while writing? Why? No. But in developing all the characters, I focused on what Chimamanda Adichie wrote, which is that there is a danger in the single story, a danger in stereotypes. We can always tell a story, but it is not the only story; it is an incomplete story. In addition to this, I consider the concept of authenticity; is there only one authentic story? Can you say that there is only one authentic rendition of a person? A person, even the most heinous person, has different sides, some of which are not so heinous. Those in power can tell the story that they want to tell; their power entitles and enables this, so I wanted to tell stories of the powerless: the pedophile, the terrorist, the porn star, the murderer.

I found the metaphor of birds throughout the novel fascinating. Can you talk about why you chose this motif and what it meant to you as the author? Birds, for me, have wings, and wings are freedom. And I was living in a far rural area at the time, and there were many beautiful birds around me, free.

Africa serves as a central piece of the story, despite the novel being set primarily in an airport and moving in many different directions. Can you talk about this choice and what you think Africa adds to the storyline? Africa is always stereotyped as a dream destination, or it is marginalised. I tried to illustrate both of these notions, and undermine them. For me, the idea of a single story in relation to people can also be a metaphor for Africa: the single story that Africa is one country in which there is only poverty, war, child soldiers, starving women and children, white saviours, and a big sky. But Africa has many stories, and in it there are 54 countries, all with different people, cultures and natural resources.

The story of Klint and his “son” was shocking to read. Was this difficult material for you to write, given the graphic and emotionally challenging nature of the subject matter? No. This is the world we live in. And what I wanted to show was, no matter how awful Klint is, he also had human emotions. He is a multilayered person, not just a monster. In stories, and in life, we stereotype people, we judge them. For me, this is dangerous and limiting, for both parties, and it creates the violent and bigoted world we live in.  

Did you encounter any unexpected challenges or surprises while writing the novel? No. I enjoyed writing it. I was living far away in the bush, isolated, maybe a phone call a week and no voices daily. So writing the book was a way of moving outside this isolated space and into one that was teeming with people, with other voices and sounds.

What do you hope readers take away from Will the Passenger Delaying Flight after finishing the book?

As said above, life is not made up of a single story. A writer’s task is to present all the stories of everyone, and this presentation is never fixed; it is ongoing, moving, changing, as are we all. There never is, and there never can be, right or wrong, only one story. Also, I believe that the novelists’ task is to unmask the absurdity of naming, of bigotry.