Above Sumatra was first published in 1964 by Baxter Publishing of Toronto as
To the Edge of Morning. The great Canadian poet Earle Birney wrote of it,
"Not since St. Exupery has any story-teller caught me up so powerfully into
the terrible and beautiful world of flight."
Gil Kramer is a Canadian pilot on a Royal Air Force squadron in Ceylon, now
Sri Lanka. It is 1943, a year after the Japanese attack on the island was
thwarted by Canada's Squadron Leader Birchall. The Japanese have shifted to
Burma in their drive to India and withdrawn their navy to the Pacific. When
Kramer arrives in Ceylon, the island has been bypassed and the squadron,
equipped with four-engined Liberator aircraft for long-range operations at
sea, is virtually idle.
The squadron is based in the jungle, where the heat and humidity are
exhausting. There is little flying because the enemy is far away and the
aircraft are seldom serviceable. But the jungle is also Kramer's personal
hell, in which months of inactivity leach away his resolve, the lack of
flying weakens his confidence, and the constant fear of death from the
aircrafts' unreliability or the violent tropical weather gnaws at his will.
The letters from his high-school sweetheart, Jessica, come from another
world that seems so vacuously unreal that he breaks off with her. He is
unmoved on hearing she has married his boyhood friend, Chuck Leowey,
back in Canada after a tour on bombers in Europe.
After eight months, reduced to lethargic passivity, he is shocked to be
nominated for promotion as a flight commander. As he wrestles with this
threat to his fragile stability the jungle's terror is suddenly manifest in
a bandit gang's attack on the camp by night. Kramer is wounded in a violent
encounter with one of the bandits; it forces him beyond the breaking point,
and he collapses.
In hospital he becomes convinced the promotion will empower him to master
the jungle. But just as he realizes he must have the job to survive, it is
filled by the unexpected arrival of his friend Leowey. Kramer, stunned at
losing what he believes promised his salvation, is maddened to find Leowey
is to fly a photographic sortie he saw as confirming his new-found power.
The jungle is no longer his enemy but his element; he retreats into it and
becomes one of its creatures. He emerges to air-test the aircraft Leowey is
to fly and okays it despite a defect in its controls. When Leowey is killed
on takeoff, Kramer is consumed in guilty rage.
He flies the sortie in Leowey's place, achieving a distance from the jungle
but unable to escape knowing he has killed his friend, and when a huge
tropical storm looms ahead, he is ready to let it destroy the aircraft. The
storm is violent, but Kramer's blind will to survive asserts itself, and the
Liberator gets through. The storm exhausts him, and the draining away of
emotion cleanses his soul. He sees his failure was not the jungle's
corrupting power but his own weakness.
In the bleak morning light before landfall on Sumatra he is left spiritually
empty, needing an undefined reassurance. He ignores a message from HQ to
abandon the flight, certain there is more to discover. And then, at altitude
for the run over Sumatra, he sees earth is no longer a suffocating jungle
but as something sublime, a magnificent amphitheatre of green mountains and
dramatic ravines glowing in morning mists, with a thin strip of human
habitation clinging to the edge of the sea. After the dark night of his soul
he realizes the humanity he shares with those below confirms his own
humanity, that he had almost thrown away.
The epiphany, the possibility of redemption, is so powerful that he delays
leaving the target, giving time for the Japanese fighters to climb to the
attack.
