Airspace in Loco Parentis
Good Afternoon.
My name is Corey Basalt, author of Airspace: In loco Parentis. I would like to submit for consideration my book for review.
Airspace, a complex story, investigates how the witness and participation of tragedy impacts an individuals’ ability to adapt, interpret, and, ultimately, continue to operate within their own daily rituals and the broader context of their culture and lives.
Henry Merceu and Jack Dempsy, lawyers with a major firm in New York City represent big business interests in an FCC, Supreme Court hearing. Jack, a senior partner, critical, analytic and astute, remains aloof from personal involvement. Henry, a junior partner, is more careless and carefree. His somewhat naïve nature betrays a high degree of acuity, and though easily distracted by material and sexual matters, these distractions ultimately fade in the larger and life changing succession of events to which he is privy.
Uma Hawkins, a successful, idealistic, and beautiful, attorney in New York City’s office of the Attorney General prepares to undertake the most important case of her career. Representing an underdog, a pirate radio station looking for broadcast rights on an unregulated radio frequency, Uma is on her way to Washington with a young paralegal, Anye Se, when her plane is inexplicably delayed on the tarmac for an extended period of time. After some degree of public confusion, horror sets in as the passengers realize the World Trade Towers have been bombed by two hijacked airliners on the morning of September the 11th.
Pandemonium and indefinite delay ensue as the flight crew struggle to maintain control over the passengers. Coincidentally, Uma and Anye are, unwittingly, sharing the same plane with Jack and Henry (tucked away in first class), opposing lawyers in the FCC case. Henry and Uma, we come to learn, know each other indirectly through another common bond, and it is a relationship evoked between them that draws a vague recollection into a tangible interaction. This curious and inchoate attraction develops further as the plane is rerouted to Halifax, Nova Scotia, following Federal orders redirecting all domestic and foreign air traffic away from the US airspace and to Canada.??
The story, at its core, follows the transformation of character of Henry Merceau in his attempts to court Uma Hawkins while the two are “stowed away” in the surreal climate of the immediate post-9/11 grounding in the beautiful landscape of northeastern Canada. However, Airspace is not simply a love story in an untimely setting; rather, a commentary on how the removal of the real and routine, and subsequent replacement with the surreal and unfamiliar brings out the primary elements of character to which each individual subscribes. As the facades of the characters fade away and return again in the brief few days in between the attacks and when they are finally allowed to return to the United States, there is opened a small window directly into the elemental natures of the characters—some searching desperately for order and logic, others embracing their “marooned” status and the hospitality of their caretakers.
Throughout, this story investigates important treatments of the profound misperceptions Americans unwittingly possess of their global impact. Airspace witnesses terrorism not as the byproduct of an arrogant religious Jihad, but rather as a last and the desperate measure by displaced individuals who are starving and afraid and without alternative for the overwhelming and debilitating poverty in their lives. Without condoning the events of 9/11, the, devil’s advocate approach Airspace employs, utilizing the deductive and nearly flawless logic of the character Jack Dempsey questioning American reaction and why her surprise for being attacked seen through Jack’s insight appears inevitable. Through the eyes of the characters and their complex relationship this story portrays large corporations and the very system of American free markets as sharing, intricately and insidiously in the responsibility for the attacks, citing careless indifference to the culturally destructive nature of pure capitalism. Similarly the novel explores, ruthlessly the placated and self indulgent American lifestyle both as a cause and reasons for the surprise over the events of 9/11.
A sample can be found at:
http://911again.com/airspace-sample/1-sample-text.htmlThe book is available for purchase through Amazon as a paperback or Kindle.
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