The Aerodrome by Rex Warner

First published: 1941

Type of work: Allegory

Time of work: Shortly after the beginning of World War II

Locale: An imaginary yet typical English village

Principal Characters:

• Roy, age twenty-one, the supposed son of the Rector and his wife
• Bess, the supposed daughter of the village innkeeper and later the lover and wife of Roy
• The Flight-Lieutenant, an officer at the aerodrome who is also an admired friend of Roy; subsequently a lover of Bess and then rector of the village
• The Air Vice-Marshal, later revealed as
• Anthony, formerly a divinity student and now the leader of the aerodrome and an exponent of a philosophy of efficiency
• Eustasia, the wife of the aerodrome’s chief mathematician and the sometime lover of Roy, the Flight-Lieutenant, and the Air Vice-Marshal
• The Rector, Roy’s guardian and putative father, who represents the old values of the village
• The Squire, the traditionalist symbol of the old ways of the village and owner of the Manor

The Novel

Written in the form of a first-person narrative of events that transpired in a single year following an April dinner party to celebrate Roy’s twenty-first birthday, The Aerodrome is a study of his ambivalence when confronted with the dilemmas that have to be faced at the juncture of adolescence and adulthood and when traditional, unquestioned ways are confronted by new and appealing ones that demand acceptance or rejection almost immediately.

The narrative opens with Roy, who has been told that his “parents” are actually his guardians, recovering from a drinking binge that followed the Rector’s revelation. On his return to the rectory, he overhears the Rector confessing to having killed a fellow divinity student, Anthony, because of jealousy, while on a mountaineering excursion twenty-two years earlier. (Anthony had been offered the village benefice and had gained the affection of the girl whom both courted.)

On the following day, the Rector, his wife, Roy, the Squire, and the Squire’s sister, Florence, attend the local agricultural fair where the Flight-Lieutenant mischievously lets loose the Squire’s prize bull, Slazenger, and kills the Rector while demonstrating a machine gun that has been inadvertently loaded with live ammunition. Meanwhile, Roy has sex with Bess, the innkeeper’s daughter.

At the Rector’s funeral, the Air Vice-Marshal announces his plan for taking over the village, converting the Manor into an officers’ club, and appointing the Flight-Lieutenant as village padre. Roy decides to abandon his plans for a career in the civil service, to join the air force, and to marry Bess. The new padre marries them clandestinely. The Squire, who is wholly disconsolate at the loss of the Manor and its lands, which was for generations the center of the village’s life, dies after apparently trying to tell Roy something about the young man’s origins. Bess’s mother, Eva, aware of how close Roy and her daughter have become, advises Roy that a marriage between the two is impossible because they are siblings (Bess was born to her while she was a maid in the rectory, she says, and Roy was born five months after his parents’ marriage and before they moved to the village—hence, the Rector’s claim at the dinner party that the innkeeper’s wife had asked them to rear a foundling.) Roy is dumbfounded and wanders by a tin hut in the fields below the aerodrome where he and Bess consummated their marriage; he discovers Bess and the Flight-Lieutenant having sex. Questioning reveals that they first had sex the day before Bess got married; Roy decides, however, that despite their presumed consanguinity, he loves Bess and will never leave her.

After his induction into the air force, Roy attends chapel, where the Air Vice-Marshal addresses recent recruits and presents his philosophy and program: Parenthood, ownership, love, and locality represent the past and the feudal, inefficient, and bumbling ways of the Village; sex, freedom, necessity, and power—by contrast—represent the Aerodrome and the future. Roy thereupon enters into a liaison with Eustasia, the young wife of the elderly chief mathematician of the Aerodrome and the former mistress of the Flight-Lieutenant, among others. Roy gains rapid preferment as private secretary to the Air Vice-Marshal but becomes increasingly alienated from his superior’s philosophy.

At a chapel service, the Flight-Lieutenant (in the role of rector) says that the Village was better off before the Aerodrome came; the Air Vice-Marshal closes the chapel and arrests and then demotes the Flight-Lieutenant to mechanic. In the furor in the chapel, the late Squire’s sister, Florence, while rushing to defend the rector (whom she identifies as “my boy”), is shot dead by the Air Vice-Marshal.

Eustasia informs Roy that she is pregnant; Bess has a mental breakdown and is treated by Dr. Faulkner, who has ties to both the Village and the Aerodrome. Eustasia and the former Flight-Lieutenant, reconciled, are killed in a car accident engineered by the Air Vice-Marshal; he, in turn, is killed when his airplane crashes because a wing on which the demoted Flight-Lieutenant had worked collapses.

In a confrontation immediately before the airplane accident, Dr. Faulkner and the Rector’s widow, addressing the Air Vice-Marshal as Anthony, reveal the complicated relationships of the principal characters. The Rector’s attempt to murder his friend, Anthony, more than twenty years earlier, was unsuccessful; unbeknown to the Rector, Dr. Faulkner nursed him back to health. Roy’s mother, pregnant with Anthony’s child, then married the Rector, though she did not love him, and he, in consequence, made love to Eva, the innkeeper’s wife, who was then the Rector’s housemaid, and became the father of Bess (who, it thus turns out, is not Roy’s sister). Meanwhile, Anthony had an affair with the Squire’s sister, Florence, who bore him a son, the Flight-Lieutenant.

In the words of Anthony, the Air Vice-Marshal, “what a record of confusion, deception, rankling hatred, low aims, indecision!”

The Characters

In a sense, the aerodrome and the village in the novel are characters: They undergo change, they affect the lives of the individuals in the story, and they have identifiable traits. (In the novel, their names are sometimes capitalized and at other times not, depending on whether they identify places or characters.) The main characters, however, are clearly two: Roy and the Air Vice-Marshal. (The Flight-Lieutenant, as Roy’s half brother—both having been sired by Anthony, or the Air Vice-Marshal—and his frequent foil, could be regarded as the third party in a traditional love triangle comprising symbols of ways of life rather than of actual individuals, even though at the beginning of the story Roy has a regard bordering on affection for the Flight-Lieutenant, and the Air Vice-Marshal occasionally displays affection that exceeds the parental form for both of his progeny.) The entire story illustrates the consequences—for good or ill—of conjunctive passion (love): The initial and propelling act of the novel is the Rector’s attempted murder of his close friend, one who shared his love for God (Love), because of jealousy over physical love. The subsequent developments, whether good or bad, are results of true love or its counterfeit (usually expressed as its physical substitute, sex). Accordingly, each of the main characters has obvious dimensions: None is flat or stereotypical. The Rector, though a respected village resident, is shown to have had the temptations, jealousies, and meannesses of most young adults, even though he enjoyed the academic and athletic successes that elude many; at age fifty-two and a man of the cloth, he is not beyond dissimulation, deceit, infamy. His wife is left anonymous—like most ministerial spouses—even though she was the crucial apex of the first love triangle that involved the Rector and Anthony.

Anthony, known as the Air Vice-Marshal throughout most of the book, is an exceptionally complex character. It is of interest that, though he enjoys almost untrammeled authority in determining the course of events for the entire country, he has the rank of vice-marshal, not marshal. One suspects Rex Warner’s intention: The rank is too high for a mere regional aerodrome commander, yet it does imply that the officer is responsible for all the vices that are associated with the Aerodrome. (It should not be overlooked that he killed his common-law wife, the Squire’s sister, Florence, and his son, the Flight-Lieutenant.) Though “his concentration, certainty, and his control,” as well as his “upright carriage,” are noted as aspects of his “remarkably impressive” bearing, the reader is told repeatedly of his opposition to feeling, emotional considerations, and the past. His antipathy to “inefficiency, waste, and stupidity” pits him against the humane, the generous, the normal in life. His emphasis on sex (to the exclusion of love and family) is symptomatic of his metamorphosis from a theological student to a fascist functionary.

The other metamorphoses, however, are no less interesting: Roy changes from an ideal and contented village dweller into a willing air force recruit and even, for a time—until he is totally disillusioned by the Air Vice-Marshal’s philosophy and administrative methods—into a willing facilitator, before he realizes that love and empathy in an environment of waste and disorganization are to be preferred to lovelessness and efficiency. The Flight-Lieutenant, at first the very embodiment of Aerodrome attitudes and principles, becomes disaffected and attaches himself to the Village before absconding with the ambivalent Eustasia. Dr. Faulkner, the medical officer, who has devoted himself to both Village and Aerodrome with equal concern for many years, is ultimately persuaded to favor the Village and its ways over the “inhuman” and “monstrous” Aerodrome and its representative, the Air ViceMarshal. Yet he is far from admirable: His prolonged silence in the matters of the identity of the Air Vice-Marshal and the parentage of Roy and Bess resulted not from love but from fear and compromise rather than an appreciation of truth and right.

Of the minor characters, the best drawn are the Squire (whose deathbed scene is one of the most artfully written in modern literature), Eva (the innkeeper’s wife), George Birkett (the bellringer), Mr. Crosby (the poultry-food man), Mrs. Wainwright (the Squire’s cook), and Wilkinson (his man). The villagers are collectively “symbols of security and peace,” as Warner calls them.

Critical Context

When The Aerodrome appeared, the noted critic V. S. Pritchett described its author as “the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas has produced.” Since then, critical opinion has declared The Aerodrome to be Warner’s most important novel: It has been included in Oxford University Press’s Twentieth-Century Classics series and has never been out of print. It has been made into a miniseries for television.

It is sometimes forgotten that The Aerodrome appeared eight years prior to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and its publication during wartime may well have affected its popularity and pertinence, since the public’s attention to the real nature of the opposition of democracy and totalitarianism was not focused until the advent of the Cold War that followed the peace of 1945. Both novels have lovers who are denied freedom to exhibit their love; both have newly ordained and unthinking overseers; both have officially sanctioned language. Orwell’s Winston Smith, however, is fundamentally a symbol, a stereotype, whereas Roy is individualized and triumphs over adversity and the institutionalization of power to return, with Bess, to the love and ways of the Village. (It should be noted that “Roy” is an Old French form of roi, or “king”: It is thus Roy rather than the Air Vice-Marshal who lives and rules.)

Some readers have noticed a similarity between The Aerodrome and the novels of Franz Kafka, but the similarity is found, for the most part, only in the use of the allegorical method. Warner himself acknowledged his indebtedness to the British allegorical writers: John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, and John Milton, in particular. Like most allegorical novels rich in symbolism, The Aerodrome rewards the reader with fresh insights into the human condition after every reading, particularly as one contemplates the authority of the Squire and Rector (absolute, yet wielded with wisdom and compassion) and that of the Air Vice-Marshal (equally absolute, yet exercised to deny the nobility and grandeur of life itself).

Bibliography

Chialant, Maria Theresa. “The Aerodrome: Prols, Pubs, and Power,” in A Garland for Rex Warner: Essays in Honour of His Eightieth Birthday, 1985.

McLeod, A. L. The Achievement of Rex Warner, 1965.

McLeod, A. L. Rex Warner: Writer, 1960.

Maini, Darshan Singh. “Rex Warner’s Political Novels: An Allegorical Crusade Against Fascism,” in Indian Journal of English Studies. II (1961), pp. 91-107.

Pritchett, V. S. “Rex Warner,” in Modern British Writers, 1947.