The ex-public school types in Hornet Squadron are variously oafish, stupid, callow, neurotically disturbed or (in one case) positively evil...Cattermole is a relentless practical joker, liar, bully and thief with homicidal propensities which make him (Robinson's text insinuates) just the right type to be a fighter pilot...After destroying most of his pilots in horrible ways, minutely described, with uncannily precise technical know-how, Robinson, resisting closure, is bound to suggest a kind of 'point' by his selection of those who are still alive in the last pages. can demonstrate his virtuosity by making somehow tolerable page after page of silly RAF backchat linked with pointless and sometimes cruel horseplay; he can emphasise stresses and fatigues which destroy men's judgement and set us up to mock the crumbling organisation of Fighter Command. But he cannot end with the Luftwaffe winning: because it didn't. (The pilots) might not be chivalric young Englishmen but they are still in the air fighting at the end, as indeed their whole groggy Command was. Robinson's book is very exciting and often, in gallows-humour mode, very funny. However he cannot counteract his reader's knowledge of the Big Fact (the Allied victory), which at times makes his approach to the battle seem wilfully cynical.