The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock review – the space race sends a marriage off course

A cowboy is plucked from the US Air Force to become one of the first astronauts in a novel set inside the 50s and 60s space programmes

With great skill (and some nerve), Benjamin Johncock has inserted his fiction into the true history of the Mercury and Gemini space programmes of the 50s and 6os. His protagonist, Jim Harrison, takes his place among the real-life American heroes of the early space race and it’s almost impossible to see the join. The dense layering of real events, seriously technical language and sustained US vernacular makes for a big, muscular novel, but this is tenderly undercut by the quite different theme of a marriage and a family under unbearable stress. Harrison starts out as a US Air Force test pilot in the Mojave desert but is selected for the space programme and moved to the new astronaut colony at Clear Lake, Texas. Even the word “astronaut” was a thrilling neologism at this point in time. The intensity of the training, let alone the constant risk of “auguring in” (dying in a crash), would challenge the toughest individual, but Harrison is also contending with personal difficulties of a quite different order. A cowboy in a silver suit he may be, but Jim Harrison’s descent into hell is convincing and moving.

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