54 pages • 1 hour read
Airborn
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Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Hot Chocolate for Two”
Miss Simpkins arrives, interrupting Kate and Matt’s conversation. She chides Kate for being alone with Matt, which she finds inappropriate. Kate counters that falling asleep on the job was the truly inappropriate act. Matt leaves the women, suddenly exhausted, and returns to his cabin to sleep.
Matt wakes in time for evening duty, looking around his little cabin, which feels homey. He recalls joining the Aurora three years prior after his father died. His nominal reason for taking the job, despite his mother’s reluctance, was money, but both he and his mother knew that Matt had always longed to fly. He looks out the window, spotting something flying. It quickly disappears, and he considers this a mirage, though it reminds him that he wishes to speak to Kate again.
Matt’s roommate, Baz Hilcock, chats merrily about his plan to propose to his sweetheart, Teresa. Matt confides his disappointment regarding the junior sailmaker position, and Baz commiserates. They joke about the uselessness of a Flight Academy certification, though Matt secretly longs to attend. Baz, only three years older than Matt, teases Matt about his youth and all the time he has remaining to be promoted. The two report for dinner service, Matt’s mood improved.
At dinner, Matt thinks of how comforting he finds it to eat at the same place and with the same people as his father did. A young stranger enters, whom Matt realizes must be Bruce Lunardi, the new junior sailmaker. Bruce is initially awkward, though he endears himself to several crew members by joking disparagingly about his rich father. Matt finds himself too consumed with jealousy to be nice to the new crew member, though he reluctantly admits that Bruce seems “a decent fellow.”
Matt spots Kate in the first-class lounge astonished that she seems so much older and more refined in her fancy evening dress. Miss Simpkins’s reputation for complaining spreads among the crew, who joke about her antics. Kate approaches Matt, who remains professional, despite his eagerness to know more about her grandfather. Miss Simpkins quickly pulls Kate away. Just before his shift ends, Matt gets a note from Kate requesting two hot chocolates to her room. He delivers them, surprised when Kate reports that Miss Simpkins is asleep. The second drink is for Matt.
Matt demurs, which frustrates Kate. There is a moment of tension between them as Matt realizes Kate cannot understand what it is like to be poor. When Kate references her grandfather, however, he decides to stay briefly despite his misgivings. Miss Simpkins stirs and Matt leaves. Kate gives him her grandfather’s journal to read, noting where mentions of the creatures begin. Matt recognizes the notebook from the balloon rescue and takes it back to his room to read.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Log of the Endurance”
Matt reads the battered journal in his bunk, skimming through the early pages in his eagerness to get to Kate’s bookmark. Malloy planned to circumnavigate the globe, heading west from Cape Town. The coordinates that Molloy recorded reveal his route is similar to the one the Aurora takes from Sydney to Lionsgate City. He gets caught up in Molloy’s narrative of his travels and realizes he has reached Kate’s bookmark.
Molloy records seeing an island veiled in mist around which an unusual number of albatrosses fly. He later concludes they are not birds, though he cannot identify the creatures, which have bat-like wings, sharp claws and fangs, and white plumage. A sketch causes Matt to think of the creatures as “half bird, half panther” (84). Molloy drew three skeletons: a human, a bat, and an invented hybrid of the two. As Matt reads, he wonders if the creatures are responsible for the damage to the balloon. Molloy notes that the creatures never land. He witnesses midair births; one newborn creature does not learn to fly immediately and plummets, possibly to its death. After the “birthing season,” the creatures depart, too fast for Molloy to follow.
The remainder of the journal was damaged by rain. Molloy’s record-keeping becomes halfhearted, though he draws numerous sketches of increasing strangeness. Matt feels uneasy about Molloy’s shift from highly rational to disturbed records and goes to sleep, where he is plagued by strange, distressing dreams.
Matt wakes eager to speak with Kate, but duties on the ship come first. At midday, the Aurora passes over Hawaii, and they witness a volcano erupt. Kate uses the distraction of the eruption to approach Matt without being distracted by Miss Simpkins. He returns the journal, but Kate is annoyed that Matt does not immediately believe in the strange creatures, citing her grandfather’s scientific observations. He cites the frequency of “sky kelpies,” reflections of light and water that resemble creatures; the phenomenon is known among airmen. He clarifies that he would like to see things like the creatures Molloy describes, but never has.
Kate produces a letter from the Zoological Society, which is likewise skeptical of her grandfather’s observations. Kate argues that it is unreasonable to expect that all existing creatures have been previously discovered, citing the great swaths of the sky as yet unexplored in the 50 years of air travel. Matt is reluctantly convinced by this logic. He promises to check if their route will pass the coordinates for the island, though he doubts it. He says he will, however, tell her when they are closest; she wishes to attempt a photograph. Kate asks him not to call her “miss,” but Matt demurs: if he begins doing so in private, he may slip in public.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Szpirglas”
On duty in the crow’s nest, Matt thinks of what he learned looking at Mr. Grantham’s charts. Nothing was marked near Molloy’s coordinates, but Grantham names the area the “Sisyphus Triangle,” so-called because airships that enter the space do not return. He leaves Kate a note reporting that they would be nearest the coordinates the next day at breakfast, blushing when Baz catches him leaving the note. Matt thinks of the self-consciousness he experiences when Kate regards him.
Matt looks out at the night sky, squinting as a “long slash of darkness” (101) obscures his view of the stars. He initially attributes this to his imagination, riled up by Kate and the journal, then realizes something with enormous wings has landed on the Aurora. He panics before realizing it is an albatross. He climbs atop the Aurora to shoo the bird away and sees a small airship approaching them, dangerously close. As the Aurora crew maneuvers to avoid a collision, the other ship matches them, and Matt realizes it must be pirates attempting to board.
The pirates drop lines to the Aurora, and Walken has no choice but to allow it, as the pirates have a cannon that could sink the Aurora. Walken tells Matt to retreat to the catwalk; Matt complies despite feeling cowardly for leaving his post. Armed pirates surrounded them, and Matt recognizes their leader as Vikram Szpirglas, a legendary pirate. Despite the tension of the situation, Szpirglas and Walken speak respectfully to one another; Szpirglas assures Walken that he intends only to steal, not hurt anyone. Szpirglas promises the passengers safety as long as they do not attempt to safeguard their belongings.
Szpirglas watches over the lounge full of bewildered passengers, offering an ironic speech about the value of love over material goods. The pirates appear poised to depart, sacks full of stolen goods, when one enters the lounge with the chief wireless officer, Mr. Featherstone, held at gunpoint. Featherstone had attempted an SOS call, contrary to Walken and Szpirglas’s agreement. Szpirglas shoots Featherstone in the head, killing him.
Matt attempts to follow two officers who escort the pirates from the ship, eager to confirm these intruders have departed. One officer, Torbay, forbids him, despite Matt’s assurances that he will not be seen. Uncharacteristically, Matt disobeys; from the crow’s nest, he sees an approaching storm. He calls down to warn the captain that Szpirglas’s ship will strike the Aurora but is too late. The propellers on the pirates’ ship slice through the Aurora’s fabric exterior and the hydrium gas holding the ship aloft begins to leak.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Sinking”
The well-trained crew springs into action; Matt helps the sailmakers patch the holes. Despite the urgency of the situation, Matt notes Bruce’s anxiety and smugly thinks he will prove a better sailmaker than the newcomer. Matt climbs the exterior of the ship, searching for holes to patch. He works efficiently, noting the approaching sea. Bruce slips and falls, dangling in his harness, and Matt pauses his work to rescue Bruce. They begin working side by side and Matt notes that though Bruce’s patchwork is neater than his own, he is less efficient.
A crew member urges Matt back aboard the ship though the patching is not yet complete. The Aurora has lost too much gas, and they must make a water landing. The crew is instructed to aid the passengers. Matt distributes life jackets, checking in with Kate, who is holding her grandfather’s journal. He reassures passengers that the water landing will be safe and the lifeboats comfortable, though privately he frets that the Aurora is not waterproof. He thinks of his father’s death, falling from the Aurora during a storm.
As they prepare to evacuate, Matt spots land in the distance: an island. The mood among the passengers lightens and the crew jumps to the beach to secure the Aurora. Despite his displeasure at being “landlocked,” Matt is impressed with the sight of the Aurora landing. The crew hastens to tie the ship down firmly. When they are done, Matt glances at the passenger quarters, where he sees Kate taking his picture.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
This section introduces two common Young Adult tropes to the novel: romance and anxiety about growing up. For Matt, these two tropes are intertwined. Though Airborn’s primary genre is steampunk adventure, the fact that YA fiction can incorporate multiple generic conventions creates space for the romance subplot that unravels gradually between Matt and Kate. This romance is not entirely comfortable for Matt; not only does his pull towards Kate continually lead him into situations he would not otherwise be in, such as fraternizing with a passenger in her rooms, but his experience of a first crush makes him uncomfortably aware of his increasing proximity to adulthood. These anxieties are explicated most clearly in Chapter 4. First, Matt is alarmed to hear that his roommate, Baz (who at 18 is only a few years older than Matt himself) is thinking of getting married to his sweetheart, whom he plans to propose once they reach Sydney. Matt is accustomed to thinking of Baz as his peer and equal; until this point, their relationship was most commonly characterized by their shared jokes about the privileged, bratty behavior of the Aurora’s passengers. Baz’s romantic aspirations startle Matt, reminding him that he himself is on the cusp of adulthood by showing him the long-term implications of his burgeoning feelings for Kate.
His anxiety about growing up is complicated by Class Divides when Matt sees Kate, whom he had met earlier that day to discuss her grandfather’s journals, dressed in her upper-class dinner dress. He thinks, “When I’d met her this morning she’d been a girl, and now she was suddenly too much like a woman” (75). This question of Kate being “too much” like a woman underscores that, despite his worries after his conversations with Baz, adulthood still feels foreign and incomprehensible to 15-year-old Matt. That he sees Kate this way when she is wearing finery suggests that Matt also sees a class element to growing up: part of being an adult involves the performance of one’s class status in different and more rigid ways than childhood allows. Inter-class friendship, he seems to innately understand, is more difficult for adults than it is for children. Childhood is thus presented in the text as a time of possibility. Adulthood, by contrast, entails ossification into a specific role from which one can no longer deviate. Adolescence, the stage of life Matt and Kate occupy, is a contested middle ground.
This section also connects the themes of Exploration, Adventure, and Storytelling and History, Modernity, and the (Im)Possibility of Discovery with Matt and Kate’s relationship. Despite the Class Divides that pull them apart, Matt and Kate bond over a shared love of exploration and the compelling story of adventure and discovery that Molloy’s journals offer them. The journals function simultaneously as the setting off point for an adventure Kate and Matt will share and as a sort of adventure novel in themselves that Matt reads just as the reader is reading about Matt’s adventures. Their approaches are slightly different, however. While Matt regularly takes moments to experience wonder at the air travel he loves so much, Kate’s desire for knowledge and exploration is framed as more voracious. She craves to know not only more than what she previously knew, but also more than other people know, and she is single-minded in the pursuit of this knowledge, even when doing so is dangerous for herself and others. Her pursuit of knowledge creates class-based conflict with Matt when it interferes with work. It also puts her in conflict with institutions such as the Zoological Society, who exercise authority over scientific and historical knowledge. While Kate and Matt, in their impetuous youth, seek new knowledge about what lives in the sky, the adults of the Zoological Society deny the possibility that there can be any knowledge to be found that they have not already mastered. In this way, the novel once more connects youth with possibility and adulthood with ossification.
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By Kenneth Oppel
