Book Review: Stateless

[osprey_archer]

Elizabeth Wein has a new book out! It’s called Stateless and skygiants wrote an excellent entry about it and my review here is a reworking of my comment over there, which might be summarized, “Good thriller, shame about everything else.”

A quick non-spoilery summary: Stateless takes place during a youth air race in 1937 Europe, meant to promote peace among nations. There are twelve fliers representing twelve European states. Our heroine and narrator, Stella North, the only girl pilot in the race, is representing England even though she’s actually a Russian refugee on a Nansen passport. And on the very first leg of the race, she sees one plane force another out of the sky…



Stateless is first and foremost a thriller, and on that level it works well. It takes a few chapters to get going, but once Stella herself is attacked in the air, I was more or less glued to the book to the end, desperate to learn who was attacking the pilots and why.

However, the book has much bigger ambitions than merely being a competent thriller, and unfortunately I felt that it fell down on them. As skygiants says, Stateless definitely wants to say something about refugees and borders and the tragedy of nationalism, but it never quite lands. Sometimes it's a little too on the nose, like the bit where Stella's flying over the old trench lines and more or less explains The Tragedy of War for us. Other times, the intended beats don't hit like they should, because the character work is just not strong enough to support them.

Stella herself is not particularly vivid, and most of the other flyers are barely more than a name and a nationality. Why yes, having about two-thirds of the cast primarily defined by their nationality does seem contrary to the Tragedy of Nationalism theme, but they simply don’t have any other characteristics for readers to hang a hat on. About halfway through the book I gave up on sorting out everyone but our main guys.

Admittedly, twelve flyers is a LOT of characters to deal with, but school story authors carry off casts of this size with aplomb all the time, so it could have been done. And because so many of the characters are ciphers, the heart-warming moment where they all come together to protect Tony and then Sebastian is just not that heart-warming. Friendship transcending nationalism can't bear any thematic weight if there's no substance to the friendship because the individual friends are barely more than names.

(Tony is the love interest. Like Stella, he is a stateless refugee, a third culture kid who has grown up in many different nations. He also labors under an incredibly whumpy backstory, and look, I get that whump writers gotta whump, but when we got to the fifth layer of whump it began to feel excessive, especially given that Stella herself only gets a single defining whump! (As a toddler, she was trapped alone in a basement apartment for five days after the Cheka arrested her parents in the night.) Perhaps there should have been some more whump parity. Maybe parcel some whump out to some of the other flyers to make them a bit more memorable.

I feel a bit bad for panning the book like this, because it is so clearly and earnestly trying to say something about nationalism and the Brotherhood of Man and war looming over Europe that is just as applicable today, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as it was in 1937. Wein even says as much as in the author’s note! But sometimes one earnestly attempts and just as earnestly fails.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Maybe the reason school stories can carry off personalizing a cast of dozens (or anyway, one dozen) whereas this one didn't is in part because it's trying to cover The Tragedy of Nationalism? The author needs to both establish their nationalities and why those are significant (for readers who aren't as up to speed on that) but then undo that--or at least, cut across that--in order to make her point. That's a lot to do! Whereas in a school story, the character's stereotype-that-needs-to-be-subverted is maybe usually not so complicated? "Jock... but likes Shakespeare!" (Okay, that's kind of a stereotype too, but you get what I mean)

I've been thinking about how modern literature is so *fast*--a lot is done by brief lines that need to tell us a whole lot (this works well for people who are familiar with whatever the genre is, but not as well for newcomers), e.g. "It was risky to enter the lottery... but wasn't the money worth the small chance that your number might be drawn?" --Dystopia readers learn a lot from that! But when those sorts of things are used for relationship building, it can end up feeling very thin. I mean, sometimes it can work, in a very allusive, light-touch sort of story. But I think if you want readers to feel deeply, intensely involved in the relationship, it takes time to *show* the relationship. Which is harder when you're also trying to educate people on the interwar period and the evils of nationalism.

[oracne]

LOL, whump quotas!

[oracne]

This! Said more efficiently than I could have done!

[philomytha]

I shall go in with suitably adjusted expectations when I get to this one. A thriller about an air race still sounds like a fun read :-)

[sovay]

Tony and then Sebastian

Who is Sebastian and how much whump does he get?

[osprey_archer]

Sebastian is the Luftwaffe pilot representing Germany in the air race. He helps Tony escape Germany, in the process putting himself in the Gestapo's crosshairs so he has to flee Germany too, thus becoming a refugee. IIRC he has no whumpy backstory to speak of - nothing on par with Tony's whole "stabbed thirteen times and left for dead in a hospital ward full of corpses" deal. (Which is merely one of Tony's whumps.)

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think if you go into it expecting nothing but an air race thriller, you'll have a fun time!

[osprey_archer]

When they send you down in the whump mines they expect you to bring a good amount of whump back out!

[sovay]

He helps Tony escape Germany, in the process putting himself in the Gestapo's crosshairs so he has to flee Germany too, thus becoming a refugee.

This book sounds like a lot of plot in perhaps too few pages.

Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1938) does not have an air race, but it is a good thriller where statelessness is a key part of the tension. I wrote about it a little in 2021.

[osprey_archer]

In many cases establishing their nationalities is just "This is Phillipos! He's Greek" (may have the Greek dude's name wrong), so it didn't take up that much page time. The twists and turns of the plot were the big page hog, which is natural for a thriller, but there's only so much time left to spend on the Tragedy of Nationalism...

genarti's theory is that the core problem was the genre demand for a Plucky YA Heroine, which may explain why Stella feels somewhat generic, which has a ripple effect on the rest of the cast. I don't read enough YA nowadays to know if that is indeed a necessity of the genre, though. (And you'd think that Elizabeth Wein, author of smash hit Code Name Verity, would get some leeway! But who can say.)

[asakiyume]

Hmmm, yes, I'd think there could be lots of ways to be a plucky heroine? But maybe not, in fact. Maybe pluckiness is kind of limiting, kind of like manic pixie dreamgirling is limiting. Although, as you say, the author of Code Name Verity ought to be up for the task. ... Actually, that's not what you said: you said maybe she would be given leeway not to do pluckiness.

PLUCKINESS! It's a curse.

[genarti]

This discussion made me realize that it's also partly, I think, because in this race every member of the cast is flying their leg of the race solo. Even if another plane is in sight, they're solo in the cockpit. They have a couple of days on the ground at each city between legs of the race -- they fly London to Paris, take a few days, Paris to the next city, and so on -- and they can interact then. But you don't have the school story situation where so-and-so is always speaking up in class, and so-and-so is running off to sports practice, and these two characters are working on the school play together, and those three are in detention together this week, and so on.

I don't think that's inherently a fault or anything! But it did give Wein a much harder job at giving her secondary characters enough screen time to develop personalities, even lightly sketched ones (I did mostly keep track of them, but in a "right, the, uh, tall Swedish one" way), and I don't think she really fully managed it beyond the core three and a couple of key chaperones.

[asakiyume]

That's a good point about the essential solitariness of the characters. (Also by the end of this thread I feel like we will have written a good portion of this for-contrast's-sake school story!(

[ethelmay]

I actually thought she got the characters quite clear. I didn't have any trouble at all telling them apart.