Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    God of Speed
    Unavailable
    God of Speed
    Unavailable
    God of Speed
    Ebook277 pages4 hours

    God of Speed

    By Luke Davies

    5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    I will fly at last. I will unfold my wings. I will unpack my head. I will step back outside. One day I may even make love again. But one thing at a time. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Film mogul, aviator, addict, inventor, visionary, recluse, serial womanizer, and political meddler: Howard Hughes was one of the strangest and most significant figures of the 20th century. His obsessive-compulsive disorder would end up crippling and isolating him; in the end he self-medicated his way into oblivion. It's a summer night in 1973, and holed up in his hotel penthouse in London, Hughes can't sleep. Tomorrow he takes control of an airplane for the first time in more than 15 years. As the reclusive, drug-addled billionaire waits for dawn, the shape and preoccupations of the times emerge from his ruined psyche; a world of oil, flight, money, movies, drugs, sex, power, greed, fear, yearning America. Transcendent and debauched, God of Speed is a fever dream, a giant and extraordinary leap of the imagination into the fractured mind of a man who was both great and greatly fallen.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRare Bird Books, A Barnacle Book
    Release dateJul 21, 2014
    ISBN9781940207575
    Unavailable
    God of Speed

    Related to God of Speed

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Blitz

      Nov 26, 2020

      The Blitz
      3 min read

    • Article

      Diary of Remorse

      Sep 6, 2022

      I was plagued by remorse, but my remorse seemed inspired by insignificant dumb things—things not really worthy of bona fide remorse. That didn’t make it any less painful or plague-worthy, as I was still riddled with disgrace on a minute-by-minute bas

      20 min read

    • Article

      Everything Happens SOMEWHERE

      Jun 15, 2020

      Everything, even thought, takes place somewhere. When remembering ordinary happenings and previous conversations, most people automatically recall where they took place and at what time. If not, they may ponder, “Now, where was I?” For more important

      8 min read

    • Article

      Stop Hating on Adjectives!

      Jun 12, 2019

      A common admonition in creative writing pedagogy is, “Cut as many adjectives as possible.” I propose that this rule springs from mere prejudice. The post Stop Hating on Adjectives! appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Until The Sea Closed Over Us And The Light Was Gone

      Jul 1, 2020

      —Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Spaces In-between

      Jul 15, 2020

      We were just off South Cape when a voice came out of the long-wave radio and announced that Tasmania had closed its borders. Everyone stopped moving. Eyes like plates, jaws dropped to the floor. Coffee mugs suspended mid-flight. The whole catastrophe

      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      From Waodanis to Weapons

      Dec 15, 2022

      From Waodanis to Weapons
      9 min read

    • Article

      Perfect Prose II

      May 15, 2020

      Perfect Prose II
      4 min read

    • Article

      My Story My Friend Cath

      Mar 25, 2020

      My Story My Friend Cath
      5 min read

    • Article

      It Happened to Me…

      Mar 24, 2022

      It Happened to Me…
      7 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      1 The doctor makes a curving incision in the left topback of my skull andlifts the cap— “What areaam I here to work on?” But Ijust want to wish his son a Happy Birthday—It had been my aim, the reason I’dwalked right into this Doctor dream—In the morn

      11 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2022

      Nothing is as important to our ability to survive as our ability to hurt. -Haider Warraich, The Song of Our Scars, 2022 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. -William Blake, T

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      After centuries of deferralto the white sky cloud cover God, who kept me on orange alert,babbling for mercies that were batted away sloppilylike dustballs in the wake of a sock, I turned to the Divine Creatrix,who built the short night, I was convinc

      2 min read

    • Article

      Tom Cunliffe

      Nov 6, 2020

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Tom Cunliffe

      Nov 6, 2020

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    • Article

      Proud, Prouder, Proudest

      Jun 12, 2017

      Proud, Prouder, Proudest
      6 min read

    • Article

      Older than Old

      Jan 17, 2022

      Older than Old
      3 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my

      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      Pallets of bottled water on the back porchwere one evidence of apocalypseor the demise of the way of thingsor lazily written computer code backin the 80s, when I was a boyand the nightly news was just about all the doomwe had stomachs for, whenwere t

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Island

      Jun 4, 2018

      The Island
      8 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    Reviews for God of Speed

    5/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Luke Davies is the sort of writer that skips past the surface of his subjects, moving deeper into that underlying subconscious place of pain and fear. His latest novel takes on the over-wrought subject of Howard Hughes. In his heyday, Hughes was America’s biggest 20th century icon, still believed by many to be one of the greatest geniuses that America ever had.His impact on the world was huge and varied, touching on the movie industry and Hollywood, aviation, engineering, biomedical research, and even espionage and warfare. His life has been the subject of numerous films, books, and studies, not only for his accomplishments, but also because of the extraordinary split between his early life when he is visible everywhere, and his later life, when his is almost entirely invisible.Taking on Hughes’ life is no small task for a novelist, especially for a writer so used to working in the micro sphere of poetry. Davies is up to it. His portrait remains something entirely new – a fiction that takes on the contours of Hughes’ life, but which goes deeper into the heart of this invented man to find everyman.The book opens just prior to the “final decline.” It’s June 1973, where a 68-year-old Hughes prepares to fly again after 13 years of reclusive dormancy. The book stays at that point, tracking Hughes’ sleepless, drug-ridden thoughts through the night as lies, waiting for his friend, confidante and ultimately biographer, Jack Real, to wake and accompany him on his flights.After those flights, Hughes fractured his hip and remained bedridden from that point until his death three years later. In his thoughts — feverish and strange — he flies through his life reflecting, refracting, and moving through those moments in such an intimate, personal way that the reader almost comes to understand him.It’s not all warm. Davies' Hughes is self-centred, moving through sex and drugs with a hunger that is as ugly as it is damaging. The name dropping is almost irritating from the intensity of his relationship with Katherine Hepburn, through Ava Gardner, Billie Dove, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Faith Domergue, and Susan Hayward - all treated with a hungry misogyny that ended up being a kind of laundry list of famous legs, vaginas, and skin, devoid of the person within the body parts.Hughes' hunger can’t be satisfied by these women, who he catalogues by the type of sex he could have with them, anymore than it could by the drugs he later used in the same way. Instead of Ginger, Bette, and Lana, there was Emperin, Valium, and Ritalin replacing that hot, fast hit of success, of a blockbuster completed, the roar of an engine beneath the legs, of making huge amounts of money.Placed in the uncomfortable role of Hughes’ confidante, the reader is made to understand this fictional Hughes, from his earliest memories of his mother’s germ fears, to his latest ones of infirmary and addiction. There is an honesty here that is painful, horrible at times, but also, and mainly because of Davies’ poetic skill, beautiful.The grand scale of Hughes’ life is all on the outside. On the inside, where the reader sits at a nightmare ridden bedside, Hughes is still that little boy, afraid of germs, and unable to breathe in, but we can still hear the outside world. Despite the small-scale scene, Davies manages to provide the big picture of Hughes’ world. We have his real neurotic memos that give us a sense of how he might be presenting to those around him.These are disturbing instructions on how many Kleenexes should be used to open the door of his cabinet, or how to “prevent the backflow of germs” in sending flowers on the death of Bob Gross, who ran Lockheed. The way in which Davies handles the relationship between inner world and outer; between Hughes’ schemes and his obsessive-compulsive implosion without ever leaving his setting of a single night, and single bed, is masterful.Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them. He succeeds and he fails, as indeed, we all do on one level or another. This is a remarkable fusion of prose and poetry, well worth reading, regardless of whether or not the subject matter is of interest to you.