Sky-pilot
David Williams
Thomas Hardy wrote his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady and offered it to Chapman and Hall. There it was read by Fred Chapman's long-serving reader George Meredith who asked to see the young man. 'Get more plot into it' he said in effect. 'Then we might be getting somewhere.' Hardy didn't resubmit his first born. He wrote Desperate Remedies instead which bursts out of its binding with plot, and Meredith was satisfied.
Did an imbroglio-hungry neo-Meredith make a similar suggestion to Rex Warner on some far-off evening when the Heinkel Ill's were beginning to throb in the dark London sky? Perhaps not, but Warner cer- tainly loads every rift of his subject with plot. How many children had the unmar- ried sister of the Squire? Read on and you'll find out. Mr Warner has often been typecast as a footsoldier marching under the banner of Kafka. This isn't a helpful parallel. Allegory, it's true, is a form which interests both writers. But Kafka is a doom-laden, • despairing allegorist; Warner, although he sees much that is nasty all about him in his end-of-the-1930s-world, manages to retain a certain buoyancy. The concluding sentences he gives to his young narrator to quote are these: "That the world may be clean": I remember my father's words. Clean indeed it was and most intricate, fiercer than tigers, wonderful and infinitely forgiving.' Kafka never saw things like that at all.
We are to imagine the aerodrome, with its Air-Vice-Marshal, its Flight-Lieutenant, its rookie-narrator, as an image of fascism. The world must be re-shaped through orderliness and discipline; fallible humans stumbling about must be shot if they get in the way. (In the way of what? The question is deliberately shirked because Warner wants us to understand that it is unanswerable. The Air-Vice-Marshal tells the rookie: `. . how treacherous and undependable the heart is, and so are all our actions that are not guided by our will towards a certain aim . . .' But 'a certain aim' is vague, of course — as Warner means it to be.)
Close to the aerodrome, but fenced off, is the village. Here they get drunk and fall flat on their faces in the mud. The gentry keep up appearances; the lawns are trim, the food well served; the time for the agricultural show comes round, and there simple pleasures are pursued till the bull breaks loose. After that things take an lbsenish turn. The past, as we've already been led to suspect, is a dark backward. The dying Squire bites his sister's hand. Mud, blood, confusion — the village is the image of the world as it is.
So ought there to be a clean-up and a shoot-out? This was the anguished 1930s question. Was the Night of the Long Knives the fitting and proper answer to the Nights of Muddle and Greed? Warner doesn't pose the question in this specific way. He is con- tent to make it become apparent by the end that both swords and ploughshares can be equally mishandled. Before the climax we know who the Air-Vice-Marshal really is. The plot turns up its last trump card. Then his potent manhandling spirit flies off to take further big decisions in conference but crashes his aircraft and dies. He is, after all, only an Air- Vice-Marshal (though Warner, subtly and rightly, never stresses this point). Somewhere, we must believe, there is an Air-Marshal. But he is always in the sky. The grotesqueries of the plot are of course quite deliberate and perfectly serve the author's purposes. Bunyanish? Wilkie Collinsish? Not markedly. Rather Reg Warner at his splendid best. The Aerodrome preceded Orwell's 1984 by eight years. Both harp on the same theme, although Warner has never had Orwell's fame. But 1984 had the hand of death on it. The Aerodrome is the better book, because it reaches out towards the light.
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