Great story, but it took till most of the way through the book to figure out if the author was satirizing the philosophy of the Air Vice-Admiral or presenting it as (forgive me) admirable. On the whole, I tended to sympathize with the "bad guy," even after I was sure he was supposed to *be* the bad guy. ( )

I ran across this book an outlet mall in Jefferson, WI. and a glance at the covers had me thinking why not ? But where I was expecting an air war story I got instead a morality lesson(I think that i s what it could be called. At first I wasn't sure what I thought of it, but I quickly got caught up in the story and yes it made me wonder, again,
expectations we place on governments. I continue to believe in social democracy, but not the so socialism represented by totalitarian governments like China and Russia.

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A strange but readable book! ( )

This is an underrated classic allegory of good versus evil. I remember enjoying reading it immensely and was later pleased to find it on Anthony Burgess' list of 99 novels which he considers the best since 1939. This is certainly among the best that I have read from the modern era. ( )

1840 The Aerodrome a love story by Rex Warner (read 25 Mar 1984) I read this because it is on Anthony Burgess' list of the 99 novels in English since 1939 which he calls "outstanding achievements." I had not previously heard of this book, but the jacket calls it "the best English Kafka novel" and refers to its "persistent, underground reputation as a minor classic." It is an allegory about an evil man, the Vice Air Marshal, who takes over an English village, told by a man who has just, at the beginning of the book, turned 21. The moral it seeks to teach seems rather obvious to me--it is anti-totalitarian--but maybe in 1941 it was a very pertinent moral. The author was born in 1905 and attended Oxford. In 1966 he was at the University of Connecticut. Some of his novels about ancient Greece and Rome might be worth reading. {But I have never yet read any of them.] ( )