TRTR Pt2 C2 a Wild Goose Chase, p.350
Mark Kohut
markekohut at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 23 18:04:53 CDT 2011
Wild Goose Chase
Rex Warner
1 Review
Faber & Faber, Limited, 2008 - 436 pages
The Wild Goose Chase, published in 1937 and Rex Warners 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 Warners 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 towns university. Only
George, the youngest brother, is able to stand up against the dictators, and he eventually leads a successful revolution against them.More » Steve Moore at the Annotations quotes two who differ on whether this plot is "like' Gaddis's. One is a good critic, Maxwell Geismar...the other is the guy,
Jack Green who tore all the reviewers a new one over the stupidity of their reviews of TR....
I actually had a paperback copy of this book [american] back in the day but tried and got lost early in the reading--- but I am pretty sure it has been out of print for a long, long time, which may be why the industrious Gaddis scholar, Steven Moore, seems not to have read it (or he would have commented and solved the dispute)...All i will add is that the Wyndham Lewis novel I read once and mentioned here, the Wyndham Lewis of Apes of God [cf. the early ape in TR] who was a detailed dark satirist not unlike Gaddis, was a satire of socialist, marxist, etc. do-gooders................
P'raps Gaddis went on a reading kick of such books??
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