Hmm, I'm kinda surprised at myself that I've read another one of these Babylon books. While I quite enjoyed Fashion Babylon, and learned a lot, I found Beach Babylon to be amusing but lacking plot. Sadly, Air Babylon seems to fall into the second category as well.Having said that, I didn't expect much and the books aren't marketed as high literature. They're good for a quick, amusing read and I liked this book enough to pass it on to a friend.
My only issue, really, is with the plot...or lack of plot. Air Babylon is about a day in the life of a British airport supervisor (at Heathrow, as I recall). It's more or less supposed to be an ordinary day, except at the end of it, a couple of the employees - including the narrator - are flying to Dubai to celebrate a birthday. Also, the supervisor has a crush on one of the flight attendents who's going to be traveling with the group. That's kinda where the plot ends - the book is really constructed around the anecdotes, and everything happens to link the anecdotes together. And in order to use the most hilarious/awful/shocking stories she discovered over the course of her research, Edwards-Jones always makes the worst thing happen. It made the book feel predictable and repetitive because you knew every new scenario was going to involve a crisis and there was no surprise when it indeed arrived.
Oh, and for the first ten pages, I assumed the narrator was a woman, I think because the cover shows a flight attendant. So it was a big shock to find out it was a man, and have to rearrange all my mental images I'd come up with.
As a side note, I can't say whether or not the anecdotes are at all true. The friend that I gave the book to spent a summer working as a flight attendant, and didn't think they sounded too outrageous. So, interestingly, an Amazon reviewer feels pretty strongly that Air Babylon is insulting exaggerated. But who knows...
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