All that is missing from this heavyweight account of a Lancaster bomber's part in a 1943 RAF raid which hit the wrong target with ten million pounds of bombs is Dean Jagger, as the former wing adjutant, riding his bicycle up to the perimeter fence and climbing through to pace along the overgrown runway. For, essentially, [Bomber] is an RAF Twelve O'Clock High intended to be complete in every particular; it's almost as if it had been computed rather than written, and certainly it reads throughout as the product of a completely supplemented mind. (p. 4)

[He] keeps loading his book with data, not to create plausibility, but because he seems to like data for data's sake. For instance, at one point we're told:

In cash, at 1943 prices with profits pared to a minimum, each Lancaster cost £42,000. Crew-training averaged out at £10,000 each, at that time more than enough to send the entire crew to Oxford or Cambridge for three years. Add another £13,000 for bombs, fuel, servicing and ground-crew training at bargain prices and each bomber was a public investment of £120,000.

As a part-indictment of war's criminal expensiveness, that's worth knowing; but, set as it is in a quasi-novel not expressly written to tout the benefits of an Oxbridge education, it only reminds me of Hemingway's dictum that a good writer knows his material so well that what he omits leaves its impress on what remains and thus, somehow, reaches the reader anyway.

On the one hand, I see the point of accumulating data and devoting an entire book to them in order to prove the appalling there-ness, the variety and nonhuman quality of available particulars—a deathly, Frankensteinian inventory. On the other, I see the point of a taut, lean, near-fable in which—as in, say, Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete or Andre Malraux's The Walnut-Trees of Altenburg—the inhumanity in men can be seen reciprocating the inhumanity, the thingness, of war material. Deighton, it seems to me, has tried to fuse the two, with results that are sometimes infuriating (as when the characters seem much less present than their gear), sometimes stultifying (as when the English airmen go on for pages in jejune conversations that could have been implied in a five-line sample), and sometimes, it's a pleasure to say, stomach-churning (as when we're told in justifiably intolerable detail what happens when flak hits an aircrew or when phosphorus bombs land on a hospital).

Half of the book is first-rate imaginative reporting, while the other half is homework done with obsessive care and worked into the text redundantly. It's as if Deighton, maybe with an eye on the movies, made himself a worse writer than at his best he is. (pp. 4-5)

There are, however, sections of the book which convey as well as anything written by an Englishman what it feels like to fly, to crash, to bomb, to be bombed, to be conscious that you are experiencing the first of your last sixty seconds of life as you fall without parachute. These sections make the mind reach and give it much to grasp. And sometimes Deighton's prose achieves a dignity of witness that subtly orchestrates the life-respect schematized in his plot, fitted out as it is with such didactic parallels as the bomber station at Warley ("Warley meant a place where draught animals could graze") and the annihilated town called Altgarten ("Old Garden")….

Perhaps the most haunting image of all is this glimpse into the cockpit of a Junkers 88 night fighter: "The cloud gave a curious unnatural constant light to the cabin, and the two men sat very still, brightly lit and shadowless, like specimens on a microscope slide." It works upon us with an exact suggestiveness all the more exact because Deighton doesn't tack on the spectrum, the type of cloud, or the way the glass slide is manufactured, and his art comes into its own with an almost inexhaustible image. (p. 5)