Word: reader
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...main interest to the casual reader of his book, which is a must for historians, is in the picture Macmillan gives of the vanishing world of the British aristocracy. It was best described by Osbert Sitwell, a friend and brother Guards officer: "The world was a ripe peach and we were eating it"; or by Rupert Brooke, type and symbol of Britain's doomed youth: "Stands the Church clock at ten to three, / And is there honey still...
Since Warner does not conceal his allegorical purpose-indeed, he flaunts it-the reader is nervously aware all along that the slender narrative has second billing. What happens, then, does not really count. What counts is Warner's message, which he states and restates with a bald clarity of which Kafka, whom Warner admires and emulates, never felt the need. "I began to see," says Roy, "that this life, in spite of its drunkenness and inefficiency, was wider and deeper than the activity in which we were constricted by the iron compulsion of the air vice marshal...
Along the way, Goerner does infect the reader with some nagging points. He has found two U.S. Marines who claim that they exhumed the flyers' bodies in Saipan in 1944, and says that the remains were either secretly reinterred or are today in the possession of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. And he quotes no less a personage than Admiral Chester A. Nimitz, who told Goerner in March 1965: "I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese." Alas, Nimitz told him no more than...
Still, there is plenty to think about in The Territorial Imperative, for the search for first causes is an exhilarating adventure. Ardrey can serve as a valuable if treacherous bridge for the stimulated reader who wants to gain more reliable anthropological ground. And if serious anthropologists persist in complaining that Ardrey is trespassing on their territory, let them consider the wolf...
...drama is of a martyred, muddling man; the death of his reasonable hero is also the death of the unreasonable men who have caused it. It is only a pity that this stranger is set down in a land and a time that are also strange to the reader...