A speculator should envision himself as floating in a balloon, with X-ray vision to see through roots, and suspended in time so that he can follow all the elements of a risky situation to its resolution.
Moving deftly between Kabul, London and St Petersburg, Hensher inflates the great cultural balloons that distorted everyone's vision, and the novel unfolds as a series of invasions and evasions (beginning with the author's own), of people and empires crossing borders, getting it all wrong, relying on preconceptions, suffering rebuffs.
"In my vision you could make enormous balloons – perhaps a kilometre in diameter.
But now, Coutts's patriotic nautical vision seems emptier than a deflated balloon.
His efforts to convince the doubters foundered in August, when his marketing vision went down like a lead balloon in the City.
The big idea people dream big and don't want their balloon burst with pesky details about why their vision won't actually work in the real world.
I had visions of that fellow in the balloon, high above the plain, floating into journalistic obscurity, so I did what one cannot ordinarily do with a babushka.
We took a horse and carriage to the square and were dutifully assailed by the sound and vision of men brandishing monkeys in nappies, balloon sellers and snake charmers.
As I stood about six feet away from the canvas, its utter redness ballooned, the nearest zips bowed outward in my peripheral vision, and something like the rush of a dentist's laughing gas suffused my brain.
Still, even she confesses to a "dreamlike vision" of her father as a hot-air balloon, "at once lifting the family and consuming all our heat to fire his updraft".
