This political allegory predates George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by seven years, but shares with it a critical view of totalitarian efficiency. The Aerodrome features two contrasting settings, highlighting the crucial differences and quintessential weaknesses of both: the unnamed village represents traditional English agrarian life, while the nearby Aerodrome represents modernity and progress. The settings are mutually exclusive examples of open and closed societies, respectively.
The ancient village is bound to the fertile earth; it is a somewhat derelict place that tolerates drunkenness, inefficiency, and indulgence in human feeling. The Aerodrome looks to the skies; it is a sterile place that rewards cold indifference, machinelike conformity, and rigorous self-discipline.
The novel’s first-person narrator, Roy, relates the events of the year that follows his 21st birthday. The Air Vice-Marshal announces that he is appropriating the entire village and putting it into the service of the Aerodrome, appointing the Flight-Lieutenant to serve as the village “padre.” Roy decides to enter the Air Force and hears the Air Vice-Marshal explain his philosophy to the recruits. He is opposed to “words without wings” such as ownership, parenthood, locality, and marriage. Parents transmit the stupidity of history to their children, so airmen should shut their parents out of their minds, along with all their parents’ ideas.
Sex, on the other hand, is perfectly permissible, as long as no children are fathered. Airmen are to reject the old values of the village through their callous and irresponsible behavior and indulgence in sexual license without emotional, marital, or filial obligations. The goal of the airman must always be the acquisition of power and freedom.
The positions and attitudes of Roy and the Flight-Lieutenant are slowly reversed. Roy begins to find the village and its traditions distasteful, while the Flight-Lieutenant begins to take his duties as padre seriously. Roy is promoted to serve as attaché to the Air Vice-Marshal, while the Flight-Lieutenant finds himself preaching against the depredations of the Aerodrome against the village. When he openly condemns the Aerodrome from the pulpit, the Air Vice-Marshal orders the Flight-Lieutenant back to the Aerodrome.
Roy steadily rises in the estimation of the Air Vice-Marshal and learns how vast his leader’s ambition is: he plans to appropriate the entire country to serve the needs of the Air Force.
When the Flight-Lieutenant is killed, Roy confronts the Air Vice-Marshal and asks if he had ordered an execution; disillusioned, Roy indicates that he no longer supports the Air Vice-Marshal’s political ambitions. But several secrets are soon revealed about the Air Vice-Marshal and his relationship to the villagers and to Roy—secrets that explain why he molded himself into a military disciplinarian and became the enemy of family and community. His tactics lead to his demise just as he expects to achieve the power he longs for.
Warner’s allegory is a chronicle of deeply felt and finely shaded emotions: Roy recounts his transformation from villager to Aerodrome officer and back to villager with clarity and sensitivity. Despite this psychological realism in the characters, the social and political environment of The Aerodrome is a dystopia, although one lacking the crushing dreariness that Orwell thought would dominate a totalitarian state.
The Aerodrome’s similarity to the fascist regimes that England faced in war at the time the novel was written is apparent; however, there is also a faint allusion to the hedonistic entrapment that Aldous Huxley recounted in Brave New World. The Air Vice-Marshal purchases the souls of his recruits with sexual promiscuity and a license to abandon the personal obligations that both complicate and enrich human life; the recruits readily accept the payoff without realizing that they have gotten the worst of the bargain.
Bibliography
Chialant, Maria Theresa. “The Aerodrome: Prols, Pubs, and Power.” In A Garland for Rex Warner: Essays in Honour of His Eightieth Birthday. Edited by A. L. McLeod. Mysore, India: Literary Half-Yearly Press, 1985.
McLeod, A. L. Rex Warner, Writer: An Introductory Essay. Sydney: Wentworth Press, 1964.
Reeve, N. H. The Novels of Rex Warner: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.