To write extraordinary books one must think extraordinary things. Rory MacLean not only thinks them. He does them. He has travelled through eastern Europe with a Tamworth pig, followed his Scottish forebears into the heart of Canada, ridden out with a warlord in the hills of Burma. With each successive adventure he manages to redefine himself. In his immensely skilled hands the genre of travel writing becomes almost infinitely elastic.

But nothing he has written so far prepares one for Falling for Icarus, for which the word ‘extraordinary’ seems scarcely adequate. Overwhelmed by grief at the death of his mother, he travels to Crete, the scene of mankind’s legendary maiden flight, and builds himself a simple flying machine. Why? Because he believes that the Icarus-like act of leaving the ground in a Heath Robinson contraption powered by something slightly bigger than a mower motor, will either kill him or allow him at last to come to terms with his loss.

For six months, through the Cretan spring and summer, he and his wife live in a tiny hill village. With the help (a word to which Cretans bring wholly new meaning) of their handful of neighbours, and the encouragement of the local café proprietor, they construct their astonishing machine in an abandoned garage under the watchful gaze of passing goats, one small boy and the village lunatic. The blueprint is taken from a magazine, the parts from wherever old wheels, coils of wire and lengths of metal tubing can be begged, borrowed or bought.

A race against time ensues - to get hold of all the parts, complete the craft and find a suitable runway somewhere in the mountainous island, before the summer winds come. The would-be aviator not only cannot fly but has no idea whether what he is building is capable of flight, and will only find out once it is too late to do anything about it.

The drama is played out against the backdrop of bone-dry mountains, dazzling skies, and a remote community creaking its way into the twenty-first century. Rory MacLean’s sense of both humour and humanity bring his portraits of the islanders vividly and touchingly alive, not only his neighbours but the cast of other characters who providentially appear from time to time with the knowledge or hardware he needs.

As he comes gradually to be accepted by the village, so he learns more of the history of the oft-invaded melting pot that is Crete, and the fierce proud people who inhabit it. People who at the last moment, in their own hour of sudden and unexpected loss, provide him with the very emotional and psychological support he needs, as the truly suicidal nature of his venture dawns on him.

This is a marvellously compelling story by any standards. But it is also a story about story-telling. For what really anchors the book and gives it its depth and originality is the sense of myth and legend that underlies every word. From the minotaur and the labyrinth and Icarus’s ill-fated escape, through anecdotes from Crete’s turbulent history, to the curious tales of local flight that keep presenting themselves to him and the villagers’ own often-dubious life stories, the value of myth as a force for continuity and understanding and acceptance is borne in on him time and time again. With it comes the unspoken realisation that he is himself engaged in the creation of a powerful new myth.

Rory MacLean has said that travel writing today is less about landscape and more about society; less about being a geographer of place and more about being a geographer of the human heart. Falling for Icarus is at once an intimate geography of the author’s own heart and a masterly observation of the power of the story to comfort, strengthen and transform the hearts of humanity at large.

The image lingers of his brave and long-suffering wife, Katrin, patiently helping him assemble the instrument of his own potential destruction. That he survives to tell the tale must have been reward enough for her. That what he has written is destined to become a classic must surely be a bonus.

Jamie Jauncy The Scotsman, 15 May 2004


Bereavement can bring out the strangest urges. Some of us find ourselves in a vale of tears, others in bleak, black silence. But a few are driven to do something altogether different; Rory MacLean was one of them. In response to his mother's death, he found himself with a burning desire to build a flying machine, and then to fly it, hoping that it might provide release in the most literal sense, a final detachment from the grief of losing his mother.  The other imperative was the location: he was going to build his machine on Crete, where legend reported the inventor Daedalus and his son Icarus making the first human flights. So began the obsession.

The exact destination chose itself. Not somewhere glamorous, such as King Minos' palace at Knossos, where legend tells us Icarus flew too close to the sun and then fell to earth. This 21st century Daedalus found himself in an inland village without any clear attractions, the sort of place most of us would drive straight past. There he found a community ready to take him in and, equally important, prepared to take on his project. 'This aeroplane is a dream,' said one of his helpers, 'and there are not enough dreams in the world.'

Several journeys are being made at the same time. Most obvious is the one MacLean and his wife make around Crete in search of pieces for his craft and, later, of a place to fly it. Alongside this there is the progress of the construction, the development of his relations with the willing islanders and the movement towards that moment when he will accept his separation from his mother.

The difficulties of constructing a readable narrative out of these diverse strands are almost as great as the challenge of building his
flying machine. And yet MacLean avoids overplaying the memoir, although he does provide us with a few poignant personal scenes, including one where he remembers the terror that the idea of death induced in him as a child. He might have made more of the villagers, though he would have risked slipping into pastiche. He could have turned up the drama of making his flying dream a reality, but at the risk of sensationalising it. Happily, he weaves the different strands together with the sort of dexterity Odysseus' nimble-fingered wife was known to have displayed.  The result, as Colin Thubron trumpets on the cover, is a book that mixes lyricism with humour and compassion.

MacLean made his name with Stalin's Nose, a travel book that showed off a fresh and vital talent. His writing is at once whimsical and serious, funny and painful, and he addresses the crucial issue of how we deal with death while cutting romanticism with a neat dash of irony.

He also provides us with an intimate portrait of the sort of community we might not otherwise have encountered outside fiction. In the jack-of-all-trades Polystelios ('Stelios-of-Many-Talents') and his crippled, big-mouthed, childless wife Aphrodite, in the womanising Apostoli, the shepherd Socrates, the stingy priest Papá Nikos and above all in the big-hearted Yióryio, keeper of the village kafeneion, who appoints himself MacLean's protector and takes the role seriously, we have a portrait of modern, rural, unheroic but still passionate Crete not seen since Zorba was smashing his plates.

Anthony Sattin  The Sunday Times, 2 May 2004


'Falling for Icarus' was chosen as a Book of the Year by Colin Thubron in the Sunday Telegraph, Jan Morris in the Spectator and Anthony Sattin in the Sunday Times.