What do You think about The Shepherd (1996)?
A terrific and classic Christmas story. The British have always associated ghosts with Christmas. Not a combination you think would work, but it does. I first read this slim little novella back in Christmas 1981. Like many of the other reviewers here I re-read it every Christmas. It's never gotten old. The story remains suspenseful and the artwork goes well with the story.Essentially it's a suspenseful story about a young R.A.F. pilot trying to make it home to England from Germany on Christmas Eve 1957. Like so many of these stories he almost doesn't make it, but he does (in the end) and in the process learns a little bit about himself, life and the specialness of Christmas. Good story.
—Checkman
—De Havilland VampireThe Shepherd is a novella about a 20 year old pilot who, on Christmas Eve 1957, set out from Lower Saxony, Germany to Blighty, UK to celebrate christmas with his family. Flying a De Havilland Vampire, a British jet fighter, he knew the flight time would take 66 minutes. After being airborne for 43 minutes, while out over the North Sea in the darkness of night, his plane suffers an electrical failure, taking out his compass and ten-channel radio set. The pilot has no way of contacting airforce personnel on the ground. The single seat Vampire could not be fitted with an ejector seat, making it almost impossible to bail out of. The pilot is frightened and devastated. "As the fighter slipped toward Norfolk the sense of loneliness gripped me tighter and tighter. All those things that had seemed so beautiful as I climbed away from the airfield now seemed my worst enemies. The stars were no longer impressive in their brilliance; I thought of their hostility, sparking away there in the timeless, lost infinities of endless space. The night sky, its stratospheric temperature fixed, night and day alike, at an unchanging fifty-six degrees below zero, became in my mind a limitless prison creaking with cold. Below me lay the worst of them all, the heavy brutality of the North Sea, waiting to swallow me and my plane and bury us for endless eternity in a liquid black crypt where nothing moved nor would ever move again. And no one would ever know." During his intensive training, the young pilot had learned that should he ever lose his radio and be unable to transmit his emergency, he should try to attract the attention of RAF radar scanners by adopting a triangle manoeuvre. This involved moving out to sea, then flying in small triangles, turning left, left, and left again, with each leg of the triangle being of a duration of two minutes' flying time. This manoeuvre should allow the air-traffic controller to spot the distressed aircraft and divert another aircraft to find it and bring it in. The rescue aircraft was called the Shepherd.The pilot did two turns of the triangle manoeuvre and waited. Nothing happened. Nobody came. Distraught at this point, all sorts of things go through his mind.He tries doing the last left turn, and again waits. By this time he has just 5 minutes of fuel left. He prepares himself for death. "It's a bad thing, a sad thing, to die at twenty years of age, with your life unlived, and the worst thing of all is not the fact of dying but the fact of all the things never done."Then suddenly, to his right, he notices something. It's a De Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber of World War II vintage. It worked! His shepherd has arrived. The young pilot is led back to a safe landing. But, who is the mysterious shepherd who brought this young pilot to safety on Christmas Eve 1957? All rational explanation fails, giving the story its surprise ending.The Shepherd is a short, 144 page novella written in 1975 by Frederick Forsyth, author of novels like The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File. It is said he wrote The Shepherd for Christmas as a present for his wife. Every year, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts a reading of The Shepherd by Alan Maitland. Maitland passed away in 1999, but recordings of him reading The Shepherd are available, like this 32 minute reading on You Tube.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2_bLE...This is a short, pleasant read / listen.3.5* / 5
—Lynda
This was a short book. I quite like short books, I seem to have a problem drifting off into my own imagination when I'm reading. So short books are a nice little way of keeping me occupied.A lonely pilot, returning to England from an RAF base in Germany is lost somewhere over the North Sea. All hope seems to be lost and he has resigned himself to an unfortunate fate. All of a sudden, a mysterious plane appears out of nowhere to guide him home. Who and what this gentle specter is, I'll have to let you read to find out.I found this story to be nicely written. There is some technicality to the text, but nothing that I would consider alienating for the audience if they were to know the inners and outters and inbetweeners of flying. The idea focuses more, I'd say, on the a realistic romanticism of flying in the 50's when technology was improving but still fairly Luddite. A pilot relied on the jet engine behind him but there was no radar to guide him, only his eyesight and analogue systems. It must have been thrilling and scary to fly at night in those days.The monochrome illustrious are dramatic and haunting and compliment the writing immensely. Their detail is a nice little touch for the reader. As the story progresses, so does the distancing loneliness of the cockpit as well as the tragedy which faced these chaps on a daily/nightly basis.This is a haunting read and something I would enjoy again and again.
—Sylvian
