Derek Robinson's new novel is earlier campaign in the life and war of the enigmatic hero of Goshawk Squadron, his celebrated Booker Prize short-listed novel of 1971. Major Woolley is the leader who turns his well-intentioned ex-public-school pilots into professional killers. Behind his breath-taking callousness there is intelligence and even sensitivity - by erasing their fair-play ethos he gives his pilots a chance to survive.
In 'Hornet's Sting' Captain (as he then was) Woolley is fighting the air war of 1917, a grindingly slow battle of negligible land gain and stupendous human loss. The Royal Flying Corps strategy is to fly Deep Offensive Patrols low over enemy territory, slogging home against the prevailing wind. It proves to b a strategy so calamitous that a squadron could suffer 100 per cent losses in a month.
The story is savagely funny and vividly exciting - without ever losing its awareness of the squalid reality of war or the individual lives involved. The men of Hornet Squadron are brilliant creation, perhaps the finest work of one of Britain's outstanding comic novelists.
