The Aerodrome: a love story has been called the best novel ever written about fascism. Certainly no other novel - none written in English, at any rate - captures so well the sinister glamour it radiated in the period between the two world wars. None probes so deeply into the confused yearnings that led many people, even in the relatively settled climate of Britain, to see in fascism and Nazism a viable alternative to the liberal democratic societies that were falling apart all over Europe. Yet precisely because it succeeds in uncovering the hidden psychological and spiritual needs to which fascism was able to appeal, The Aerodrome is far more than an anti-totalitarian tract. Written in the summer of 1939 and published in 1941, it is an allegory that illuminates far more than fascism.
Its structure has a seductive simplicity: Roy, the narrator, grows up in a Village bordering an Aerodrome. Life in the Village is a messy melange of shambling indolence, drunken camaraderie and miserable sex. In contrast, orderly, efficient and flawlessly clean, the Aerodrome is the site of a disciplined organisation that aims to free its members from the limitations of ordinary humanity. Its ethos of self-mastery is embodied in the demonic figure of the Air Vice-Marshall, who urges Roy to turn his back on the squalor of the Village; he must rid himself of the cloying loyalties of place and family and dedicate himself to a higher life. As the Air Vice-Marshall declares, Roy's destiny is "to escape from time and its bondage, to construct around you in your brief existence something that is guided by your own will, not forced upon you by past accidents, something of clarity, independence and beauty".
The self-deception that is built into this Nietzschean creed is revealed when Roy discovers that he is the Air Vice-Marshall's son, one of two that the airman has fathered and disowned, while never actually renouncing his concern for either of them. Roy sees that the Air Vice-Marshall's wilful striving has only led him deeper into delusion. His life is dedicated to truth and the transcendence of human frailty, but it is actually based on the most commonplace infidelity and deception.
Roy turns his back on his father. He prefers to live in the contingent world, with all its risk and mess. The subtitle of the novel is "a love story"; and it seems to be the attraction of love - the human bond that his father most resisted and denied - that impels Roy to embrace ordinariness. In the Air Force, he reflects, "we had escaped from but not solved the mystery . . . we had banished inefficiency, hypocrisy, and the fortunes of the irresolute or the remorseful mind; but we had destroyed also the spirit of adventure, inquiry, the sweet and terrifying sympathy of love that can acknowledge mystery, danger and dependence".
The Aerodrome is easily interpreted as a parable of the evils of collectivism. The Air Force stands as a symbol of the totalitarian state, whose perfect efficiency rests on the suppression, cruel but always incomplete, of ordinary humanity, while the Village is a cipher for freedom - the lax and confused but still fundamentally sound and decent life that Britain was defending against the Nazis by the time the book was published. If we follow this line of interpretation, we will place The Aerodrome in the category of dystopian novels that includes Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984.
There is no denying that Warner's novel has something in common with this genre, but reading it this way misses what is original in the novel. The defining feature of dystopian literature is that it denies the appeal of the utopias it satirises. It makes us see them as wholly repulsive. No normal human being would ever want to live in the bleak, obsessive and sadistic society imagined by Orwell. In the same way, the worlds envisioned by Huxley and Zamiatin lack any redeeming feature. True, Huxley has one of his characters point to the lack of suffering - of crime, war, disease, madness - in the dystopian society; but this is so obviously a parody of the Benthamite philosophy that is the book's main target that we are unmoved by it.
In contrast, Warner's achievement is to show how an ordinary human being can be drawn to an ideal that rejects commonplace reality. The philosophy of the Air Vice-Marshall is shown to be finally wanting, but at the same time it is portrayed as the manifestation of an urge towards self-transcendence that is intrinsically human. A longing for freedom from time and chance is found in many mystical philosophies, starting with Plato. In cruder forms, it animates a good deal of occultist thinking, some versions of which were extremely influential in Nazism. Warner is subtler than any of the anti-utopian writers in grasping that fascism was more than a rejection of freedom. In part, at least, it was the expression of a thwarted religious need.
The Aerodrome's allegorical structure has led to comparisons with the writings of Kafka, but I think its true affinities lie elsewhere. In showing the Air Vice-Marshall to be driven by a desire to overcome ordinary human existence, Warner places him on a par with the metaphysical rebels of Dostoevsky's novels. Ivan Karamazov, who wanted to "hand back his entrance ticket" to God in protest at the cruelty and injustice of the world; the crazed nihilist Kirilov in The Possessed, who wishes to kill himself in order to become God; Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who decides to kill an old woman to demonstrate that he is above ordinary moral laws - these are all men who despise the common run of humankind and seek a godlike freedom for themselves. Dostoevsky meant these characters to be an indictment of liberal humanism, and - though Warner is a far more balanced writer - the Air Vice-Marshall is allotted a similar role.
It is not only the appeal of fascism that Warner is interested in uncovering, but also the weakness of liberalism. As he noted in an essay on "Dostoevsky and the Collapse of Liberalism", published soon after the end of the Second World War, liberal thinkers are adamant that ethics and politics can - and must - be rigorously secular; but the idea of "humanity" that they invoke is very obviously an inheritance from Christian ethics. Dostoevsky exposed the religious passions that animate socialism. In The Aerodrome, Rex Warner does the same for fascism. In so doing, he gives us a poetic image of the ambiguities of liberal humanism that is as unsettling today as when it appeared more than 60 years ago, in the tumult of the Second World War.
John Gray's most recent book is Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (Granta)
