The Aerodrome by Rex Warner and The End of Law by Thérèse Down

I happened to read these back to back but I am writing about them together as they speak to each other.

The Aerodrome was first published in 1941 – a time of national emergency in the UK when the military, the state was actually taking over whole villages in the interests of what officials had determined to be the greater good.

The Village seems to be a mix of Thomas Hardy and Cider with Rosie and at the time of writing rural England probably did have places that were still like that, but now few places in the UK are genuinely “rural”. The Air Force is technocratic and that model of rational progress was dominant in the UK not only in the 1940s but perhaps on into the later 1960s before it began to falter.

But there is a layer of the story about whose parents are who which to me confused matters, and the fact that the end point is the revelation that the Air Vice Marshall is “mad” perhaps softens the critique of the institutions.

The Aerodrome is a fiction the End of Law engages with the reality of the Holocaust.

There is real horror in the End of Law – as much as we pretend we don’t we forget the Holocaust, or some how within the big numbers become detached from the individuals that died – and Thérèse Down brings you back face to face with the individuals. I felt physically sick at times reading this.

She also shows how step by step ordinary, compassionate, reasonable people found themselves enacting the Holocaust – and that is the most scary thing. We can perhaps label Hitler himself as evil or crazy, and maybe a small number of others – but the industrial scale of the Holocaust could only happen when a vast number of ordinary people participated.

I worry that we think we would easily notice a new Hitler rising but what we really need to see is the low level but pervasive toxicity – that can creep up on you all too easily.