Books: Ancient Contest

THE AERODROME by Rex Warner. 302 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $5.95.

In a modest way, the allegorical novels of Rex Warner have enjoyed a steady vogue in England since he began writing them there in the 1930s. This reissue of The Aerodrome, first published in England in 1941 and in America in 1947, will give readers in the U.S., where Warner has had no vogue, a chance to judge the publisher’s claim that it is a “minor classic.” It may not be a classic, but neither is it minor.

It is not much of a story. An air force installation takes over” the English village in which Roy, the young narrator, grew up; it soon becomes clear that the air vice marshal in charge is scheming to take over the earth. Meanwhile the world that Roy knew is crumbling in other ways. He is told that the couple who raised him are not his parents. His marriage to a barmaid named Bess sours under the possibility that she may be his sister, as well as under her adulterous preference for the flight lieutenant from the aerodrome. The air vice marshal’s plot fails, and Roy at length goes back to Bess (who is not his sister) and to the old ways.

Since Warner does not conceal his allegorical purpose—indeed, he flaunts it—the reader is nervously aware all along that the slender narrative has second billing. What happens, then, does not really count. What counts is Warner’s message, which he states and restates with a bald clarity of which Kafka, whom Warner admires and emulates, never felt the need. “I began to see,” says Roy, “that this life, in spite of its drunkenness and inefficiency, was wider and deeper than the activity in which we were constricted by the iron compulsion of the air vice marshal’s ambition, a life whose very vagueness concealed a wealth of opportunity, whose uncertainty called for adventure, a life whose unwieldiness was the consequence of its immensity.”

The anarchy of life opposed by the clean disciplines of totalitarian power: it is an ancient human contest, and Warner has the insight to see that these antipathetic power forces are also sympathetic. “It seemed to us,” Roy says of the aerodrome and the village, “that between these two enemies there was something binding and eternally so.”

The Aerodrome suggests that Warner is a writer of extraordinary, controlled power who levies on his work the totalitarian discipline that it requires and deserves. Anyone rereading The Aerodrome will be struck by how firmly Warner’s tolling cadences have lodged in the echo chamber of the mind, and how rewarding it is to hear them again.