Rex Warner – författare

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCKA model of efficiency and order, the aerodrome stands on the hill looking down on the village below. Roy, coming of age in the messy, violent and adulterous world of the villagers, is simultaneously attracted and repelled by this strange place and by the powerful figure of the Air Vice-Marshal. Soon he is led to leave his family, his friends and his love in order to join the aerodrome and confront the secrets of this mysterious and sinister place...

This is a retelling of 32 legends from Greek mythology.

Julius Caesar combines in one volume two of Rex Warner's most acclaimed historical novels: The Young Caesar and Imperial Caesar. The latter won the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Together these two novels create one of the most compelling and substantial portraits in modern fiction of Caesar's remarkable life and times. 'A very brilliant analysis of the emotional disciplines, the political subtlety and the moral realism required to secure absolute power. It is a remarkable historical reconstruction.' Angus Wilson, Observer'As a feat of sustained historical imagination Rex Warner's autobiography of Julius Caesar is an astonishing achievement . . . A very wonderful book which grows in the memory.' C. V. Wedgwood'This splendid books ranks with Graves's I, Claudius and with Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian as a near-masterpiece of the re-creation of the ancient world. It will banish forever the boredom that often still lingers round one's memories of having to translate Caesar.' Elizabeth Jennings, The Listener

The Wild Goose Chase, published in 1937 and Rex Warner's first novel, was a groundbreaking piece of fiction. The novel follows three brothers whose journey is a dazzling original political allegory of liberation through Marxism. While most socialist writing of the 1930s took the form of social realism or reportage, Warner broke with this tradition, drawing instead on surrealism, classical mythology, fairy tales, film, and popular genres of the time including Boys Adventure and science fiction. Its publication immediately secured Rex Warner's reputation as a major writer. In the novel, three brothers - Rudolph, David, and George - embark on a dangerous quest in search of the 'wild goose'. Their search takes them into a neighbouring country and they eventually arrive at a sealed-off town where the ruling dictators have enslaved the people and secured a life of privilege for themselves and a few harmless professors who teach at the town's university. Only George, the youngest brother, is able to stand up against the dictators, and he eventually leads a successful revolution against them.

In this moving and thought-provoking novel, the spirit of a dead soldier asks: 'Why was I killed?'. From each individual he questions, he receives a different answer. The English gentleman, the mechanic, the priest, the mother robbed of her son, the man who fought in Spain - for each of these people the war in which the soldier lost his life has a different meaning. Whether they believe it to be a pointless horror, an outcome of sinister politics, or an inevitable aspect of history, each of these individuals feels himself to have been cruelly robbed by war. But the soldier's own vision and revelation at the moment of his death offers an alternative interpretation of the consequences of war. Highly acclaimed when it was first published in 1943, Why Was I Killed? will continue to be relevant as long as humans go to war. 'A striking and rare work of imagination.' Edwin Muir'The beauty of his prose, unsurpassed by any living English writer . . . springs from a sound moral core and from an intelligence which operates with the keenest edge upon our prejudices, our swollen abstractions, our confused thinking.' C. Day Lewis

Julius Caesar combines in one volume two of Rex Warner's most acclaimed historical novels: The Young Caesar and Imperial Caesar. The latter won the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Together these two novels create one of the most compelling and substantial portraits in modern fiction of Caesar's remarkable life and times. 'A very brilliant analysis of the emotional disciplines, the political subtlety and the moral realism required to secure absolute power. It is a remarkable historical reconstruction.' Angus Wilson, Observer'As a feat of sustained historical imagination Rex Warner's autobiography of Julius Caesar is an astonishing achievement . . . A very wonderful book which grows in the memory.' C. V. Wedgwood'This splendid books ranks with Graves's I, Claudius and with Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian as a near-masterpiece of the re-creation of the ancient world. It will banish forever the boredom that often still lingers round one's memories of having to translate Caesar.' Elizabeth Jennings, The Listener

The Professor was Rex Warner's second novel, published in 1938, only a year after his groundbreaking first novel, The Wild Goose Chase. It is one of the most extraordinary and enduring political novels from the 1930s and further confirmed Warner's status as a major writer. A Professor of Classics is appointed Chancellor of his (unnamed) country, under threat from both the government of a neighbouring country and its own fascist party. The Professor is a staunch believer in the liberal values his own country espouses but considers himself 'above politics', in contrast with his son, a revolutionary. The Professor's conviction that he must not enter into the political arena means that he finds himself unable to defend his liberal beliefs, even as he and his country are thrown into chaos. The consequences are violent and shocking.