 "AIRPLANE MODE: An Irreverent History of Travel")
AIRPLANE MODE: An Irreverent History of Travel
Author: Shahnaz Habib
Publisher: Catapult
Pages: 288
Price: $27
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Like exercise, flossing and college, travel has long been held up as an incontrovertible good — an essential part of the modern human experience. Lately, though, there’s been some pushback from the smart set, if not the jet set.
The staycation, a word Merriam-Webster has traced to World War II advertising, lost any remaining stigma during pandemic lockdowns, with the air suddenly clear of traffic pollution and birdsong audible in one’s own backyard. In The New Yorker last summer, the philosopher Agnes Callard laid out a “Case Against Travel,” prompting a flurry of avid, even angry, rebuttals and calls of “clickbait” from people who enjoy going to unfamiliar places, some pounded out indignantly from the road.
And now lands Airplane Mode, by Shahnaz Habib, a lively and, yes, wide-ranging book that interrogates some of the pastime’s conventions and most prominent chroniclers.
Beginning with the assumption that “travel” is a pastime at all, rather than a potentially violent upheaval, or a battle with bureaucracy. “Only Americans, British, Australians and Japanese travel,” a carpet-store proprietor tells Habib when she visits Konya, Turkey, a variation of an edict she heard, with more condescension, in graduate school: “People from the third world do not travel; they immigrate.”
Habib prefers the term “third world” to its more politically correct alternatives, she explains in a passionate afterword, praising a certain “audacity of its unwieldy internal rhyme” that Steely Dan has also noticed. She is a translator who has worked for the United Nations, and the English language is a source of sensual fascination.
Habib was born in Kozhikode, India, and grew up in an “unhistoric” district in the seaside city of Kochi: A jumble of fish markets, sewing and hardware shops that she thanks Robinson Crusoe for ignoring. Her father hates to travel, preferring his familiar bed and reading online news. He declined a drive-by past the White House (“Why? What is there?”) and declared a helicopter trip over Manhattan “eminently avoidable.” He gets to know foreign destinations by inspecting their fruit and vegetables. I love this guy.
Habib marries a white American man, who blithely assumes a babymoon to Paris while her green card is in process will not be a problem. “It is impossible to tell a good story in which your primary antagonist is paperwork,” the author writes, but she’s wrong. The couple’s quest for an Advance Parole, a forbidding-sounding travel document for noncitizens, plus a French visa that will let her go on this simple trip — “a video game with higher and higher levels of form-filling” — is domestic tragicomedy of Lucy and Desi proportions.
Constrained at least intermittently from roaming the world, Habib finds ways to be transported, figuratively, from where she lives in Brooklyn. Postpartum, she takes long, aimless bus rides through its neighborhoods with her new baby, alert to how motherhood makes her less vulnerable to male attention. (So much more of this to look forward to!)
She is a prodigious and sceptical reader, for example, or noting the marginalised characters in the colonialist-tinged detective novels of Agatha Christie and wondering about their stories. She analyses guidebooks, from Baedeker to Lonely Planet. “Every time I pick up a guidebook, Lucy Honeychurch and Miss Lavish fight for my soul,” she writes, referring to characters in the E M Forster novel A Room With a View, who, respectively, depend on convention and serendipity as they journey. (How nice, by the way, to reclaim “journey” from New Age babble.)
Even watching “The Great British Bake Off,” “perhaps the feel-goodest program in the history of television,” is occasion for Habib to consider how slavery, after forced travel under the most atrocious conditions, enabled the sugar trade.
As for other travel writers, she seems through with Paul Theroux and is scathing on an article by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker, about an all-inclusive Chinese package tour of Europe, on which he was the only white man.
But Airplane Mode is far from a castigating, joyless book — just one that urges readers to be alert to the world’s injustices and impending catastrophes as they take their pleasure jaunts. Habib reminds us that Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, was detained in 1999 on his way to speak at Davos and notes how the passport has increasingly become “a transactional commodity rather than a national identity.”
She is conscious of how climate change will transform travel — Venice, anyone? — and how travel has changed the climate.
When Habib does get away from it all, she is a ruthlessly honest and funny observer, comparing her “feeble herbivorous voice” to the slashing adventuresomeness of an Anthony Bourdain; admitting to craving Thai food on a trip to Spain and then exploring the forces that made it available there; confessing that she doesn’t actually enjoy visiting monuments.
Interestingly for a book that takes its title from an iPhone setting, Airplane Mode doesn’t much discuss how little super-compasses like Google Maps, Yelp and their ilk have Changed Everything Forever when it comes to travel. But in an era when souvenirs are all but obsolete, every trinket on Earth available in a click, it’s a lovely little snow globe, shaking up hardened perceptions.
The reviewer is a book critic ©2023 The New York Times News Service
