A review by octavia_cade
Airport by Arthur Hailey

adventurous tense slow-paced

3.0

This airport thriller was first published back in the 1960s, I think, but a lot of it still feels contemporary. I think it's because of the very effective focus on all the different interlocking parts of the airport and the people who work in it. Hailey has clearly done his research, and the different jobs, stresses, and priorities of everyone from traffic controllers to mechanics to pilots, administration, and stewardesses are given genuinely thoughtful treatment; the parallels to today are easily drawn. I enjoyed it, and the last third, in particular, was tense and exciting... but my goodness, the glacial pace of the first two thirds! Because there's so much focus on all these different characters and elements, this book is heavily weighted to set-up. I didn't give the blurb much of a read, to be honest, before I started on this, so at the halfway point I was genuinely wondering if I'd misunderstood the genre and this was just going to be a slice-of-life novel about tensions at an airport during a snowstorm, or if something thriller-ish was actually going to happen. Well, it did happen. Eventually. 

Very eventually. And it was worth it when it did, but it took a long while to get there.