Flying Finish - Dick Francis

Bored-with-life protagonists are nothing new in Dick Francis books. But there is a different element to them every time which does preserve the uniqueness of every character.

Henry Grey, a Lord who has no fascination about his own title, works in a bloodstock agency, pushing around papers. A loner, cleanliness zealot, an amateur jockey, and a bloody good pilot: Henry is bored with his job and takes up a position as labour in a transport agency, responsible for transporting horses from one country to another. His job requires docking horses in planes, taking care of them in the journey, unloading them at their destination, and clearing customs in the destination country; all of which, as it turns, out, is a very methodical procedure.

The story progresses as Henry takes a job transfer from his desk job to the more menial horse handler job, gives a cold shoulder to his families demands of marrying into a respectful family and settling down as a “Earl” ought to, deals with his father’s death, flies planes, does favours for friends, and eventually falls in love. Nothing major seems to be happening in the story for a very, very large portion of the book. The Sin City type monologue tone of the book keeps you hooked. And considering Dick Francis books are no voluminous epics or anything, reading them, when there does not seem to be much action, is not as painful as it is with a lot of other books. Yes, there are a couple of people who have disappeared in these trips on which horses are transported, but Dick Francis underplays it so much that even though you know the story is precisely about that, you don’t expect much from it. And you do begin to want something to happen to break the boring monotony of Henry’s life.

And the book plunges headlong into the climax, with very little warning. And all of a sudden it’s all happening. A reader feels as dazed as Henry Grey as he tries to battle it out with the bad guys. And there is a gripping bit of writing in the end as Henry Grey finds himself flying a plane without any communication gear, in the thick of the night, lost in the European skies. And Dick Francis does some fantastic piece of narration about Henry Grey flying an airplane, something that I might not have been interested considering the technicalities involved. But Dick Francis keeps it sufficiently simple for the non-pilot readers, as I expect most are, and gets the complexity of Henry Grey’s predicament through to the reader.

And then, the book ends. The climax draws to as sudden an end as it began. There are five lines which explain away everything and the book ends. It was bizarre. The characters were great. The story was quite good. But the build up to the climax and the smoothing to the conclusion was just not there. I just turned over the last page and there was nothing more. That’s that!