Cold comfort | 22 May 2010

A good story is made of bones. It’s the reader’s job to flesh it into intimacy. In Helen Simpson’s adventurous new collection, In Flight Entertainment, the best stories rattle like skeletons; the worst, squelch.

The title piece is about a bullying businessman on a plane, up-graded to first class, pontificating: the scam of carbon-offsetting; the reason it’s pointless to stop using airplanes (‘In a word, pal — China!’); the inconvenience that the flight’s going to have to land in Iceland because some selfish guy in the seat across the aisle has just died.