Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights is a meandering yet focussed rumination on the nature of travel – the story meanders but the intention remains unwavering. There was something of the structure of the book that made me felt that if novels are normally written on the vertical, this book worked on a horizontal plane.

Flights appears to be about travel, but the theme that that is visited again and again seems to me to be more about home. People travel away from home, and others return. And some are homeless, either figuratively or literally.

The book has a narrator who pops in now and again like a familiar face with first person commentary, and then seems to disappear for stretches of time. The ending of certain storylines and starting of new ones, some familiar, made for a jarring read, but in a powerfully enjoyable way.

Tokarczuk’s writing is beautiful. Near the end of the book she describes a character’s fatal stroke as a flood of the blood that is destroying his memories, his personality, his life. It’s a powerful, breathtaking metaphor that she carries for a couple of long paragraphs:

But the crimson inner ocean of the professor’s head rose from the swells of blood-bearing rivers and gradually flooded realm after realm – first the plains of Europe, where he’d been born and raised. Cities disappeared underwater, and the bridges and dams built so methodically by generations of his ancestors. The ocean reached the threshold of their reed-roofed home and boldly stepped inside. It unfurled a red carpet over those stone floors, the floorboards of the kitchen, scrubbed each Saturday, finally putting out the fire in the fireplace, attaining the cupboards and tables. Then it poured into the railway stations and the airports that had sent the professor off into the world. The towns he’d traveled to drowned in it, and in them the streets where ha had stayed awhile in rented rooms, the cheap hotels he’d lived in, the restaurants where he’d dined. The shimmering red surface of the water now reached the lowest shelves of his favourite libraries, the books’ pages bulging, including those in which his name was on the title page. Its red tongue licked the letters, and the black print melted clean away. The floors were soaked in red, the stairs he’d walked up and down to collect his children’s school certificates, the walkway he’d gone down during the ceremony to receive his professorship. Red stains were already collecting on the sheets where he and Karen had first fallen and undone the drawstrings of the older, clumsy bodies. The viscous liquid permanently glued together the compartments of his wallet where he kept his credit cards and plane tickets and photos of his grandkids. The stream flooded train stations, tracks, airports, and runways—never would another airplane take off from them, never would another train depart for any destination.

The sea was rising relentlessly, the waters swept up words, idea, and memories; the streetlights went out under them, lamp bulbs bursting; cables shorted, the whole network of connections transformed into dead spiderweb, a lame and useless game of telephone. Screens were extinguished. And finally that slow, infinite ocean began to come up to the hospital, and Athens itself stood in blood—the temples, the sacred roads and groves, the agora empty at this hour, the bright statue of the goddess and her little olive tree.

This is the literal flood that fells the professor’s brain and ultimately causes his death. I love the images it creates.

I read this book in just a few days, and I don’t really feel I did it justice; in hindsight, if I had understood the way the book is broken down, I might have put more effort into reading it in discrete chunks of one solid long episode or a number of small ones. Next time! And though more books go on the “to-reread” pile than I ever actually reread, I’ll put a star next to this one hoping it gets closer to the top.

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Buy Flights here.