The central question for an armchair traveller is whether a novel's setting is inextricable from the story. As a romantic armchair traveller I'm partial to books where love is the bond that ties all the elements together.
Mary Stewart’s gothics or romantic suspense novels are classics of the romance genre. Among their many charms is a strong sense of place. As Lenemaja Friedman writes in the last chapter of Mary Stewart (Twayne's English Author series, Northeastern University, 1990), "[...] she is comfortable in the out-of-doors, and so are her characters. She knows about the trees and the flowers, the birds and the rocks; she also has a painter's eye and a poet's ear and as a result creates passages of excellent description". Airs Above The Ground (originally published in 1965) is a solid example of these strengths.
Not only does Vanessa March's husband cancel their long-planned holiday to disappear on a sudden business trip to Sweden: a newsreel shot of a fire reveals him to actually be in Austria - and holding a young woman. Determined to discover what is going on Vanessa boards a plane to Vienna and hunts down the travelling circus at which Lewis was last spotted.
The title of Airs Above The Ground comes from dressage and the artful maneuvers famously performed by The Spanish Riding School's Lipizzans. These provide the inspiration for a story that moves from Vienna to the rural province of Styria, and from a music-filled circus tent to the night-dark roofs of a crenellated castle. We are introduced to an intrepid heroine whose wifely concern and professional background as a veterinarian drive her headlong into a plot involving spies, international crime, and animals variously dignified and foul-mouthed.
Airs Above The Ground used to be one of the two Stewarts that I was lukewarm about (The Ivy Tree is the other). It does not have the gothic fairytale enchantment of Nine Coaches Waiting, the wit or scenic drama of This Rough Magic, or the emotional depth of My Brother Michael. What it does have is a teenage sidekick, a circus, and horses. The pacing in the book's first two thirds feels as leisurely as the atmosphere of the sleepy, sunny villages in which much of the story takes place, and the love interest, in this case the heroine’s husband, is absent for large chunks of the story.
Each rereading of the book has improved its previous standing in my estimation. Perhaps my expectations of a higher romance quotient got in the way early on; perhaps my tastes have a acquired bit more sophistication. While the romantic protagonists in Airs Above The Ground are already married and the bubbly anticipation from experiencing two characters fall in love is therefore missing, the sexual tension and banter between the pair is allowed freer play than in any other of the author's contemporary stories, including Touch not The Cat (the only one which includes a love scene). A slight datedness to the male/female interactions does not detract from the intelligence or likeability of the protagonists; indeed, the whole cast of characters is vintage Mary Stewart, colourful and well-rounded. The details that build the mystery are complex, and once the action switches into high gear the suspense at one point culminates in one of Stewart’s most pulse-pounding chase scenes.
Airs Above the Ground may not be Mary Stewart's most dazzling offering, but its touching epilogue completes a story as rich and satisfying as a generous slice of Sachertorte. With whipped cream on the side.
Excerpt (Hodder and Stoughton paperback edition, 1967, p.50)
“Beyond Wiener Neustadt we found ourselves in a rolling landscape of forested slopes, green pastures, and romantic crags girdled by silver streams and crowned with castles.
It was a scene from the idylls rather than from romance, pastoral rather than gothic. The valley bottoms were rich with crops, and the hayfields stretched golden right up to the spurs of the hills. Even when the road – magnificently engineered – began its twisting climb to the Semmering Pass, there was still nothing in the grand manner about the scenery; the great slopes of pine forest were only a shelter and a frame for the peaceful human picture below.
We ate at Semmering – a resort which, at four thousand feet, is sunny all winter and which now, in the height of summer, had air so dizzyingly clear as to make Timothy [the teenage sidekick] extra ravenous even by his standards, and to restore to me something of the appetite which had been taken away by the nervous tension that I hadn’t yet admitted, but which increased steadily as we neared the end of the journey.”
