Rex Warner's novel subtitles itself "A Love Story". It is, in fact, several love stories and rather more. Matters begin in what feels like the 1930s, in an unnamed English village, a place of red-cheeked parsons and lightly-moraled barmaids, identifiable from English literature all the way back to Henry Fielding and beyond. Its hero is Roy, a bright and ambitious boy of 18, whose parentage is about to prove far more uncertain than he imagined and who is about to fall far more deeply in love (with the barmaid, Bess, naturally) than he had ever imagined possible. This simple location and these simple characters - plus a vicar, a squire and their respective wife and sister - are used by Warner to set in train at least three tales: of Roy's love for Bess, of the strange, loving-yet-hating relationship between the squire and his sister and of a terrible murder, 18 years in the past.

So far, so Eastenders (in fact, when Warner adds the discovery of a potentially incestuous relationship into the mix, this could easily be any of the soaps). But Warner is by no means satisfied. Alongside the village he places the aerodrome of the title and in the aerodrome he places a set of values and of people wholly opposed to those of the village. It is a place of machines and straight lines, where the air force men are encouraged, ordered, to set themselves above their fellow men and way above their fellow women. They are taught to abandon regret and avoid love, as they strive to "be freed from time ... from the past and from the future ... from shapelessness" and to act decisively so that "the world may be clean".

Unsurprisingly, the young men of the village admire and envy the crisp-uniformed and confident men of the aerodrome - men who can drink and love and kill with a blithe unconcern - and the young women adore them. Only the old and tired, who can see they will have no place in the aerodrome's uniformed and uniform new world, have no love for the men who march along their streets and swagger into their houses.

Driven both by his need for Bess's admiration and by a desire to be one of the smiling and efficient young men, Roy himself is driven to join up. On the aerodrome itself he both finds and loses love, as well as discovering the true mission of the aerodrome and of its leader, the commanding and charismatic Air Vice-Marshal.

The Aerodrome is a brilliant, unsettling book whose characters - however stereotypical they may sometimes seem - are always capable of springing a surprise. It is, as Michael Moorcock's excellent introduction to this edition points out, almost unique among the many dystopian stories being published around the same time, in producing a realistic vision of the attractions of totalitarianism. If it is all too easy to see why John Savage rejects Huxley's Brave New World or to see why Winston Smith wants to escape the restrictions of Orwell's Airstrip One, Warner's unique achievement is to make it all too easy to see why Roy would be attracted to the world of the aerodrome.