'Airborn' by Kenneth Oppel

Oppel, Kenneth. Airborn. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd., 2004. Print.

Cover Photo from
HarperCollins Canada

Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn is a novel that follows in the tradition of classic adventure novels, such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Treasure Island.  Except for a few details.  Oppel’s novel, the first in a series, introduces us to an alternate reality where airships (otherwise known as zeppelins or blimps) are the primary means of long-distance travel and not sailing ships.  The airships even use hydrous -- an alternate universe element that nonetheless sent me running for a periodic chart just to make sure it was, in fact, imaginary.  What we call the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean are known as the Atlanticus and Pacificus, and the city of Vancouver, British Columbia is called Lionsgate City, the hometown of the hero of Airborn, Matt Cruse.  (It didn’t take me long to figure out Lionsgate City was the alternate universe version of Vancouver.  There’s the Lionsgate Bridge near Stanley Park, a set of mountain peaks called the Lions, and Matt mentions the grey, rainy weather on one of his visits home, which is the dominant weather pattern of Vancouver from roughly October to April.)

When Airborn begins, Matt Cruse has been serving as a cabin boy aboard the airship Aurora, under the guidance of Captain Walken.  The Aurora has a special place in Matt’s heart.  It was the ship where his father, a sailmaker, had served and died in a terrible accident.  We first see Matt when he spies a hot-air balloon in an unexpected location.  Matt is instrumental in helping to rescue the occupant inside the balloon’s gondola.  The gentleman inside the gondola is ill and dying, and before the Aurora docks in Lionsgate City, he dies.  And, that, as far as Matt knows, is that. 

A year later, Matt is still a cabin boy, but there’s a promise of promotion to junior sailmaker.  Everyone on board thinks Matt deserves this chance.  He knows the airship inside and out, spending all his spare time learning how to fly her, soaking up as much knowledge about the intricacies of airship travel as possible.  Matt, is seems, was born to be an airship captain one day.  Literally.  He was born on an airship when his parents left Europe for North America (Oppel 48).  The fly in the ointment is Bruce Lunardi, a graduate of the Airship Academy, and the son of owner of the Aurora, who has been installed into the vacant junior sailmaker position meant for Matt.

One of the passengers on the voyage to Sydney is Miss Kate de Vries, who happens to be the granddaughter of the gentleman in the hot-air balloon that Matt rescued a year earlier.  Kate is on a quest to find the strange creatures her grandfather saw near an unchartered island on his journey and she is determined that nothing will stand in her way.  Not even Miss Simpkins, the chaperone accompanying her.

Halfway through the voyage, the Aurora is boarded by the infamous pirate Vikram Szpirglas and his crew.  It sets off a chain of events that tests Matt’s skills as an air sailor, risking his life to save his beloved Aurora and everyone on board.

Airborn falls just inside the boundaries of the genre known as steampunk. Steampunk literature, as defined by Emily Rozmus, often contains a mishmash of “old and new, technology and mythology” (31).  Steampunk has its roots in the novels of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and by the “1990s writers… began to weave Victorian settings and the technologies which evolved from the Industrial Revolution to create a new type of reading experience” (Rozmus 31).  Steampunk can also take place in a speculative future, where technology never advanced past the Industrial Revolution, but steam power is used in innovative ways.  Steampunk is a little bit science fiction, a little bit fantasy, with a healthy dose of adventure. The steampunk setting is just off-kilter enough to establish that this isn’t the usual sci-fi/fantasy novel, but still recognizable to readers as a familiar time and place.  Far from being a niche genre, steampunk has recently taken a life of its own, including cosplay at Comic-Con International in San Diego, and indeed most other comic cons.

Steampunk also features airships, not just Industrial Revolution era steam technology (Rozmus 32).  Most of the action of Airborn takes place on an airship.  Airborn has two sequels, and in reading their descriptions, it looks as if Oppel dives more deeply into the classic elements of steampunk literature as the series continues.  While steampunk generally takes place in the Victorian era, Airborn is set during the Edwardian/pre-World War I years.  

One of the issues Oppel addresses rather adroitly in Airborn is the class divide. He never uses the novel as a cudgel to beat his audience over the head with class inequality, but subtle mentions here and there or the words of a character offer critiques of the social structure that limits Matt’s opportunities.  When Matt discovers his promotion to junior sailmaker has fallen through, Captain Walken tells him, “Forty years ago, if you didn’t have money -- and my family had none -- you began as a cabin boy.  I did it, just like you.  Then you could rise by dint of hard work and honesty and skill.  Now there is the Airship Academy -- and getting in takes not just skill, but money or connections or both… they can teach them certain things.  But not character.  Not hard work, and not the mettle it takes to sail a ship aloft across continents and oceans” (Oppel 41).  Kate invites Matt to her cabin for a late-night hot chocolate, which Matt refuses due to a non-fraternization policy between crew and passengers aboard the ship.  When Kate protests, Matt ruminates that in “her world… she got her own way, and nothing was impossible… could she even imagine how other people lived?” (Oppel 65).  Needless to say, this draws inevitable parallels to James Cameron’s film Titanic, which also features an upper-class girl flouting social conventions with a lower-class boy onboard an ocean liner (“Airborn” 66).  Airborn doesn’t suffer in comparison. 

Oppel’s characterizations of Matt, Kate, and Szpirglas are the best ones in the novel.  Other characters, like Miss Simpkins and some of the other passengers, come off as one-note caricatures of upper-class society, more concerned for their antique furniture or observing their definition of propriety than the lives of the passengers.  Matt isn’t just another adolescent boy yearning for adventure.  He has to work to support his mother and two younger sisters after his father’s untimely death.  He’s steady, responsible (mostly), and has a keen thirst to learn everything he can about airships.  Matt is not a reckless character and is unwilling to take unnecessary risks with the lives of other people.  It’s also implied that Matt hasn’t truly grieved for his father.  When Matt’s father died, they were unable to recover his body, so a small corner of Matt’s mind still clings to the fantasy that his father’s spirit can only accompany Matt while he’s flying.  Kate is a spunky and resourceful heroine, the kind that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1930s film (early Katharine Hepburn).  She’s also quite serious about science and zoology, and harbors a desire to study it at a university someday, much to the chagrin of her “proper” society parents.  Oppel writes her as someone who does not like to hear the word “no”, but balances it with Kate wanting to direct her stubborn behavior toward something good.  There are a few places where Kate’s somewhat entitled mindset overrides Matt’s experienced judgment.  The captain’s respect for Matt falls a few notches, because he views Matt as complicit in Kate’s activities that are causing trouble for the rest of the crew.  In the character of Bruce Lunardi, Matt learns that money cannot purchase happiness.  While Bruce has all the social advantages Matt does not, they haven’t helped him find a purpose in life; whereas Matt knows exactly what he wants to do with his life. 

Szpirglas is an excellently written villain.  Perhaps one of the most complex characters of the novel, Szpirglas is suave, charming, and a devoted father to his young son.  He’s also a cold, calculating killer. The best scenes of the novel involve Szpirglas and his pirates.  Just their presence creates a crackling tension that’s all the more heightened, given that most of the action takes place several hundred feet over the open ocean, where falling overboard will lead to certain doom. 

The plot is a fairly “simple adventure story about a boy and the airship he loves and calls home and some adventures he shares with a young passenger” (Nilsen, Blasingame, and Donelson 103).  The best and most briskly moving sections of the plot generally take place onboard the Aurora, especially when Szpirglas is on the scene.  There is a middle section where Oppel spends considerable time weaving together the two plot strands of the novel: Szpirglas and his pirates and confirmation of the existence of the flying creatures Kate’s grandfather saw before he died.  Like Matt, I was eager to get off the island and back into the air.  This section wasn’t boring, but it didn’t have the same sense of urgency that the sections onboard the Aurora did.  If the creatures had turned out to be a figment of Kate’s grandfather’s imagination, I don’t feel the story would have suffered as a result.  Kate’s grandfather left such vivid descriptions of them and their ceaseless flight that it would still be possible to draw parallels between the creatures and Matt’s need to stay aloft and stay one step ahead his own grief at losing his father.  Thankfully, Oppel “places the emphasis squarely on the adventure rather than the romance” (“Airborn” 66).  I found it slightly hard to believe that Matt would worry so much about Bruce Lunardi flirting with Kate when Matt’s home, the ­Aurora, was in danger of being destroyed.  I didn’t find the idea of Matt being intrigued by Kate to be out of the realm of possible or believable, but I found the romance angle to be slightly absurd in the context of the rest of the story. 

Overall, I found the book to be an enjoyable read and felt Oppel leaves the audience wanting more.  Thankfully, there are two more books about Matt Cruse: Skybreaker and ­Starclimber.  This was my first real experience with steampunk and I would like to explore more books in the genre. 

Oppel has a website that contains news from the author, events, and a teacher resource page that has downloadable and reproducible (for educational purposes) material.  Other books written by Oppel include: The Boundless, This Dark Endeavour­, Such Wicked Intent, Silverwing­, Sunwing, Firewing, and Darkwing.  Airborn was a Printz honor book in 2005 and the winner of the 2004 Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Text.

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Works Cited

"About the Book." Airborn. 2014.Web.
<http://www.harpercollins.ca/books/Airborn-Kenneth-Oppel/?isbn=9781443411226>.

"Airborn." Publishers Weekly 251.17 (2004): 66-7. Academic Search Complete. Web.

Nilsen, Alleen Pace, James Blasingame Jr., and Ken Donelson. "2004 Honor List: An Encouraging Illustration of Extended Horizons." The English Journal 95.1 (2005): 103-8. JSTOR. Web.

Oppel, Kenneth. Airborn. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd., 2004. Print.

Rozmus, Emily. "What is Steampunk, and Do I Want it in My Library? (Chances are it's Already there!)." Library Media Connection 30.2 (2011): 31-3. Education Source. Web.