Piloting a Boeing Dreamliner can be less than dreamy

Mark Vanhoenacker dreams of my nightmares. Ever since he was a young boy, he fantasised about piloting airplanes. Ever since I was a young boy, well, let’s just say I’ve preferred to take the train.

Of course I know that, statistically, flying is safe; but that knowledge doesn’t stop the unnerving sense that at some point the laws of physics will reimpose themselves and we’ll be punished for our former miracles. And let’s be honest, if God had wanted us to fly, would he really have invented airline food?

Vanhoenacker has no such worries – which is handy, since he’s fulfilled his dream and now pilots Boeing 787 Dreamliners round the world (a life he detailed in his surprise 2015 bestseller Skyfaring). For him, flight was always a form of refuge. Growing up in smalltown America with a speech impediment and a ‘dawning awareness I’m gay’, he would sketch imaginary metro-polises in his bedroom and dream of flying planes to faraway places ‘where speech and life will be effortless’. His latest memoir charts that journey, from Seoul to San Francisco, Delhi to Rome, weaving in civic and poetic histories along the way. It’s not all glamour, though: even a Dreamliner pilot visits Milton Keynes.

Like many books ostensibly about travel, Imagine a City is really about home. Vanhoenacker’s story is a variation on the Great Expectations narrative, with our young hero feeling uncomfortable where he grows up, flying the nest for a series of transformative experiences but discovering he can never quite leave home nor fully return.

The most moving parts of the book are when the author grapples with this tension and meditates on the pull of his loving parents and distant hometown, whose memory provides a solidity at the heart of his nomadic life.