Memoir: With regard to air disasters, there is a kind of sanctity about those final minutes, sealed as they are in silence - partly because the equipment that might give some idea of what was happening, in human terms, has failed and partly because - unlike with bombs or earthquakes or illnesses - when a plane crashes, nobody survives to tell us what it felt like.
The hermetic nature of the experience is perhaps one of the reasons we fix, with such fascination, on the details that do emerge.
The detail that stuck with me from the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111 (which went down off the coast of Nova Scotia as the result of a fire in the cockpit) was the fact that apparently only one passenger - who also happened to be a pilot - was wearing a life vest at the time of impact. Investigators concluded that passengers had probably not been instructed to don life vests. I wondered how the other passengers had regarded him as he put on his vest, and what psychological mechanisms had prevented them from following suit. Perhaps fatalism or superstition or even, crazy as it seems, a reluctance to appear scared. Or maybe the chaos was such at that point that nobody even noticed. Anyway, the life vest was a moot point. All 229 passengers and crew died on impact.
Ivy Bannister's sister, Patty, was a flight attendant on Swissair 111. Bannister, a playwright and fiction writer, and a native New Yorker resident in Ireland for 35 years - who wrote about the whole experience in a feature last month in The Irish Times - opens this memoir on the morning she heard the tragic news, and takes us through the next 12 months, up to the one-year memorial service at the crash site near Halifax. (The flight, on its way from JFK to Geneva, was attempting to divert to Halifax airport.) It is less about what happened on Flight 111 than about the author's fraught relationships with her mother and her late sister, both of which were brought into stark relief by Patty's death.
Patty - in her early 50s when she died - is a character who emerges largely and often poignantly through the contents of her Manhattan apartment, which her sister had to sort through and dispose of. Patty's possessions betray a life of anxiety and loneliness. She hoarded, among other things, china and crystal for a wedding day that never arrived. (The china sat unused for so long it was stuck to the shelf.)
Patty's peculiarities pale in comparison with her mother's, however. When the 80-year-old Hortense broke a hip a few months after the Swissair crash, Bannister travelled back to Manhattan to care for her in her cramped apartment. Her mother shows her gratitude by constantly screeching such things as, "You're so stupid!", and "You're so selfish!", and "You're boring me. Real women prefer the company of men. I'm afraid you're just a horse's ass."
One might assume these are the rants of an elderly woman gone mad with grief. But the awfulness was, apparently, par for the course. Ivy and Patty grew up in a world of "verbal violence, of unstoppable invective . . . relentless assaults on . . . anything and everything that we were or weren't".
This catalogue of verbal abuse takes up a third of the book, overshadowing whatever information is emerging about Flight 111, compensation claims, and other potentially interesting narrative lines. This is not a memoir that mixes autobiography with reportage. Instead, it poses too many rhetorical questions that fail to do justice to what was clearly a massive sense of grief.
"Patty's fate appeared ghastly and unjust," Bannister writes. "What was she doing at the bottom of the sea?" "Was it true? Was she really dead?" "So why that plane in particular? Why Swissair 111?"
I did want to know why - in the material sense - but the causes of the crash are never clarified here. Nor do we learn what happens with the class action suit. Whatever about the discomfort of putting a monetary value on the life of another (or of discussing that actuality in print), big payouts are one of the major factors in airlines investing in better safety, and the process claimants undergo is surely an interesting one.
If this memoir felt to me like a missed opportunity (particularly in light of its timeliness), it's also clear that what interested its author was less the crash itself and its effects beyond her immediate family than the unhappiness of the life that was lost in it.
For those curious about the bigger picture, the final report of the Canadian Transportation Safety Board makes for fascinating reading. For instance: "There was no integrated in-flight firefighting plan in place for the accident aircraft, nor was such a plan required by regulation."
Molly McCloskey is a novelist and short story writer. Her latest book is the novel Protection, recently published by Penguin Ireland
Blunt Trauma: After the Fall of Flight 111 By Ivy Bannister. Ashfield Press, 239pp. €13.99