The Aerodrome A Love Story
"First published in 1941, eight years before Orwell's equally prophetic Nineteen Eight-Four, The Aerodrome is probably the only novel of its time imaginatively to understand the dangerous yet glamorous appeal of fascism and the less confident, only half-satisfactory answer of traditional democry. A comedy of high seriousness, the book is subtitled 'a love story', because it is from the incalculable power of love that the Aerodrome — ruthessly efficient and self-sufficient — and the Village, with its sensual muddle and stupidity, have developed. On the one side is the youthful narrator, brought up in the Village; on the other stands the Air Vice-Marshal, an idealist whose satanic pride forces him to reject the world as it is and to attempt to reshape the whole material of human life."--Page 4 of cover.