Man's Mortality by Michael Arlen (1933)

 This is one of those novels which I feel would have a better reputation if it had been by someone else, or had come out near the beginning of the author's career. Coming as it does after a long string of hugely successful, elegant, somewhat philosophical, dashing novels of high life, as different to them as it is in a good number of ways - well, the die had already been cast, and it is shrouded and eclipsed to some degree. What Arlen stood for had been determined, and this didn't quite fit. Though I have seen some of the contemporaneous reviews - people were impressed at the time, and saw what a revolution it was. But the fact of how good it is couldn't quite make it out to the light in a more permanent sense. This story of the world fifty years hence (it is set mainly in 1987) is one in which Arlen clearly wants to say that he has something to say beyond his usual fare, and, at this more matured point in his career, the means to say it. He posits a rearrangement of world power into an international stasis via the discovery of certain technical innovations in flight. There is now a company, International Aircraft and Airways, or IA&A, at the centre of the web of global interconnection, and nationalist interests are very much subdued across the world. But there are still a few outliers, Italy and China being the most powerful. Also, the Directors of IA&A, a small but broadly multi-national group of supposedly well-meaning public benefactors, have begun to assume levels of control and attitudes to power which are showing signs of corruption, although this fact is well hidden, all seeming serene outwardly. Into this mix, Arlen stirs an influential father and son whose new invention of even further technical prowess in flight threatens, in the hands of the son, who is aware of the corruption, to become very awkward indeed. Young David Knox has developed machines which can utterly defeat those of IA&A, and he has right on his side, aware as he is of growing chicanery among the bigwigs of the company. What Arlen manages to do, though, amongst these futuristic thriller plotlines, is weave in confidently powerful discussion of the manoeuvrings and sleights of hand as egos battle one another, as beliefs come into high contrast, and as personalities respond to pressure, both raising and lowering, all while very little is out in the open, and secret strategizing is going on at a hectic rate, guessing others' capacities (or lack of them), conniving to be the one who comes out on top. The characters are in a good way recognizable as Arlenian - they are stylish people of the 'thirties, with a sophisticatedly fashionable way of speaking, but he has managed to subdue their high vogueishness much more to the plot. To this amalgam he adds a level of drawing out, a pulling through of threads of personal and political philosophy which are mature and telling. And above and beyond that, even, there are touches which betray a wish for spiritual deep extension, whereby at certain points of stress, what is happening broaches the potentially supernatural and puzzling, in an oddly sinister register. The culmination illustrates how Arlen was feeling about the future, with an inevitable slide to break-up of hegemony, revivified nationalism, and finally war. So this novel is prescient in some ways, a flight of fancy in others, and a fascinating example of a trapped author using watershed-of-career levels of energy to showcase skill.