[In the following excerpt, Cunningham provides a favorable assessment of Sillitoe's The Lost Flying Boat.]

Not all trite-seeming fictional packages disclose tosh when you unwrap them. A few sleuths actually turn out to be Grail-seekers, some ordinary Coral Islanders end up as Lords of the Flies. And the overt simplicities of Alan Sillitoe—this time a generous freight of boyish-looking adventure stuff—can prove most deceptive ones.

When Adcock, Sillitoe's wireless-operating narrator [in The Lost Flying Boat], meets Bennett, the ex-RAF bomber-pilot who's urgently crewing up a flying-boat to go snatch a trove of German gold coins off an Antarctic island, he spots the man's cigars: Partagas. Or, as he notes （quick on the alphabetics）, Saga Trap backwards. And saga modes certainly proliferate hereabouts. It's RAF Bigglesforth time as the great plane's clutch of doomy hards—‘bespoke tragedians’ they're called—heads out for every trouble that a rival gang, assorted ‘gremlins’ in the works, and this kind of Press on Remorseless, All In It Together, And Then There Were Five plot can sling at them.

But, it soon eventuates, they're flying into no mere saga trap. In fact, they're in a much more intriguing corner, a giant solipsistic container laden with their fears, violences, suspicions, and their good and bad recollections of the war. They thought they were escaping from nightmares of nights in Lancasters over Essen and Berlin, and putting their troubled peacetime marriages behind them. But whichever way they fly is confusing and hellish—especially for Sparks Adcock, accustomed to using human signs to codify, sort out, make plain, but condemned now to radio silences and mounting haziness on a flight into inexplicables, moral murks, a hermeneutics of darkness. Boy's Own hero meets frustrated semiotician. It's a rather dazzling convergence. …