Final Approach charts the turbulent flightpath between a jetsetting father and a planespotting son.
Final Approach is a long way from being the type of book I would normally read and enjoy. I do not share Mark Blackburn’s twin obsessions of gas-guzzling cars and aeroplanes, nor is his background of a well-heeled family and public school education anything like my own. However, I found Final Approach a riveting read and Mark Blackburn an engaging and very likeable narrator. He writes with self-deprecating humour and seems incapable of dwelling on any feelings of malice or resentment even to those who have clearly behaved badly towards him.
Final Approach is the story of Blackburn’s life, with the constant thread of his love of planespotting running through it. He charts this obsession from his childhood right through to the present day and describes his compulsion to see planes, photograph them and note their registration numbers. Indeed, planespotting determines the whole structure of this, his autobiography. Each chapter heading is the three-letter IATA code for an airport (MIA, LGW, ORK and so on) and each airport plays a significant part in the story of Blackburn’s life.
We learn of his time at boarding school and his studies at the LSE. His failure to get into the RAF for pilot trining because of hay fever and his flirtation with stand-up comedy and punk rock. Blackburn ran a chain of successful sports and footwear shops, a vocation which he enjoyed and which suited his creative talents. The role required a lot of travel, in particular travel by air. Indeed, air travel has been a constant theme throughout the various iterations of his career.
But at the book’s heart, both its sun and shadow, is Mark Blackburn’s relationship with his late father. David Blackburn OBE was a domineering, larger-than- life character. A successful businessman and Liberal Democrat donor, he owned a string of properties and businesses across the globe and his presence left an indelible stamp on the life of his son. When the younger man’s chains of shops ran into difficulties in later years and he was forced to sell up, he was persuaded, against his better judgement, to work for his father. This was not a happy time in Mark Blackburn’s career.
Other figures come and go with each chapter: family members, friends, colleagues, a succession of girlfriends. None of them, however, even his mother and his younger brother Stephen, his orginal co-conspirator in planespotting, are fully developed as characters; they are left as pencil sketches. It is as if they fade into the background before the all-pervading presence of Blackburn’s father.
David Blackburn was a charismatic figure, full of energy and chutzpah, but with the constant potential for his charm to flip into something rather more over-bearing. Mark Blackburn’s life story suggests he is a very different person. But, reflecting on his life in the pages of Final Approach, he accepts that he is cut from the same cloth as his father and, therefore, has the potential to share at least some of the older man’s characteristics. The advantage Mark has, one is led to infer from a close reading of Final Approach, is that he has a degree of self-awareness that is searingly acute and which happens to make him an insightful and engaging writer.
Mark Blackburn
Mark grew up in Berkshire but, arriving in London during the heyday of punk to study at the LSE, he felt that was where he belonged. Sundry abortive attempts at stardom followed, as a stand-up comedian, actor and musician. A successful career there as a shoe-seller followed, but Mark now lives in Somerset, England, doing what he loves best – writing. He has written a number of short stories, poems and other pieces of creative non-fiction which have been published online and in print.
