Waypoints begins with a perhaps startling fact: that the escapologist Harry Houdini became the second person to make a controlled powered flight in Australia, when he circled a paddock for over two minutes at Digger’s Rest north of Melbourne in 1910. Who was the first, you might wonder? Never mind who: Waypoints teases but insists it’s more important that we know Houdini wasn’t first; this novel “isn’t what something is but rather what something isn’t”.
Not knowing, inversions, negatives, space, death: the finicky narrator of Waypoints is nothing if not a contrarian, someone going against the grain, fighting gravity as it were. We learn at length he is Arthur Bernard Cripp, latest in a line of circus men and, like Dante’s guide with whom he shares a name, narrator of his own journey through hell and purgatory. He has recently become enraptured with the idea of recreating Houdini’s second-ever controlled flight to the letter: same outfits, same date, same plane, same nine witnesses, same paddock, “that waypoint of waypoints”. He is drawn to the “gravitas” of Houdini’s flight “the record, the facts, the hope of it, the ghostliness of it”. Why he is doing so is the disappearance of his wife Allison and daughter Beatrice, turning what starts as a gripping deluge of facts and information into a moving account of grief.
Waypoints feels a little like the Wikipedia game, in which you take two distantly related topics and click through links on the page until you reach the other. It offers the pleasure of bringing facts and ideas close together and seeing what sparks crackle between them. We so often hear about the curses of the information age (conspiracies, post-truth, jobs displaced by technology) but here Ouston reminds that it is also something of a miracle, to have all this knowledge at our fingertips, as Bernard travels into the past, across oceans, deep underground, and at last into the future of the human mind. Bernard diagnoses our age’s problem as a loss of awe and wonder, those emotions that were the bread and butter for performers like Houdini. “We are now so advanced that everything creates these feelings and we’re immune to them,” Bernard notes, “Even a simple love-heart text you send to someone sitting right next to you goes up into space first!” It’s an old-fashioned idea, but it’s not naïve; Ouston considers the dark side of progress, the fact that flight is a result of military ambition, how the drive to explore the unknown has been exploited for colonial purposes.
When it’s operating at its best Waypoints offers a “return to the age of awe … when there was a sense of hope for what progress the future would bring”. We might have become numbed to the wonder of flight, but by tracing its contingent origins Ouston reminds us of “the miraculous”, the “three hundred tonnes at thirty thousand feet” of a modern passenger jet. But physics tells us no force exists without its opposite, and awe relies for its impact on an element of fear, so Waypoints also serves some truly disturbing passages on dying in plane crashes (a vanishingly small possibility, Bernard helpfully reminds us; “frankly it’s a miracle that anyone dies this way”).
There is some powerful imagery; Bernard’s accomplice has a “gait like a lurching top-heavy ship”; or finding his wife’s hairs on the furniture that “hiss[ing] like taipans”; or an rather too vivid description of what happens when a plane crumples, the seats “creating a huge, multi-fanged metallic jaw”. Bernard’s sentences spill on and on, in one single paragraph, the compulsive writing of someone who is obsessed with detail and clarification. Take, for instance, one that spins off from a story about explorer Larry Wells finding the body and diary of his cousin Charles who was lost on the same expedition:
now he could carry news back to his family and the guilt he undoubtedly felt as a result of losing one of his company (a relative, no less) could be in some part assuaged by the knowledge held in that diary and the closure it provided, which in a sense drew an indelible line under the life of Charles Wells, brought him back to his loved ones and kept him tucked up in the cradle of their affections, as opposed to spinning off into the aether of open-ended unknowing, a state in which I found myself for a long time …
Countering those fears about our age of information, Bernard and Waypoints ultimately see hope in the possibility of knowing more and more and more.
Gay rating: not gay.
The Library Is Open 
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