Word: warners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...STONES (219 pp.)-Rex Warner-Lipprncoft...
...Warner, 44, is a onetime British schoolmaster whose personal bogeyman has by now become that of most men of good will: the cynical assumption of the dictators that mankind fears nothing so much as freedom and longs for nothing so much as to be asked for blind political obedience. Men of Stones is Warner's fifth novel of worried warning...
Already they prostrate themselves before him in worship. To symbolize his oneness with his bemused subjects, he makes a crippled old woman prisoner his official consort. To cut off his link with the past, he kills his own father, one of his political prisoners. In what Author Warner intends as appropriate irony, a prison cast is rehearsing for a performance of King Lear as the novel's climax approaches ; the end of the play is to be the signal for the Governor's Putsch...
Armor of Love. Author Warner's little allegory is generally clear enough. The Governor, so sure that the "masses" want someone to worship and not to be told "that it is their duty to think," evilly overreaches himself. But poky liberalism gets caught in the middle, as usual, and goes down, leaving the opportunist Minister for Public Instruction in doubtful control as civil war begins. Only the Governor's passively Christlike brother, a concentration-camp veteran, and his simple peasant wife are left free to face the evil with an armament of unselfish love...
...Author Warner once ended an essay called The Cult of Power with these words: "The only reply to the cult of individual or racial power and violence is the actual practice of general justice, mercy, brotherhood and understanding." The trouble with Men of Stones as a fictional elaboration of this credo is that it reaches the intelligence without ever finding the way to the heart...