The Pilgrim's Regress

This allegorical novel, published in 1933, is partly a reflection on the philosophical journey of the author. The narrator explains the journey as a dream (or series of dreams). The central character, John, leaves his home in Puritania in search of the beautiful island. It combines aspects of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim's Progress, as John encounters characters such as Reason, Halfways and Vertue, and of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels, as he comes across places such as Claptrap, Ignorantia and Zeitgeistheim. It was the author’s first novel and paved the way for the Space Trilogy and the Chronicles of Narnia, which, like this novel, combine allegory,  adventure and critical comment on current affairs.

The author, C. S. Lewis (born 29 November 1898), was the son of a Welshman. He was brought up in Belfast and educated there at Campbell College and in England at Malvern College. In 1916 he began studying on a scholarship at the University of Oxford but within a few months he was preparing for war service. From a cadet battalion in Oxford, he obtained a commission in September 1917 as second liuetenant in the Somerset Light Infantry and was sent with the 1st Battalion to the Western Front in November. He was wounded by shrapnel at Riez du Vinage on 15 April 1918: “Just after I was hit, I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death. I felt no fear and certainly no courage. It did not seem to be an occasion for either.” He was invalided back to England and remained in hospital until October. He never made a complete recovery and suffered from headaches and respiratory trouble for the rest of his life. His trauma produced nightmares: “On the nerves there are... effects which will probably go with quiet and rest... nightmares — or rather the same nightmare over and over again.” After completing his undergraduate studies he spent almost 30 years working as an academic at Magdalen College, Oxford before becoming a literature professor in Cambridge. His most famous works of fiction, the Chronicles of Narnia, deal with tyranny, conflict and sacrifice and were written in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The novel contains one reference to a past war and this could well be read as a reflection on post-war Europe. A young boy explains:
“We lost our ideals when there was a war in this country... they were ground out of us in the mud and the flood and the blood. That is why we have to be so stark and brutal.”
John argues in response that the war happened “years ago”:
“It was your fathers who were in it: and they are all settled down and living ordinary lives.”
Certainly the reference to mud must have been shaped by the author’s own experience of the battlefields of the Western Front.

Threepenny Novel

This satirical novel, published in 1934, is set in London during the Boer War. The central character, George Fewkoombey, is an invalid soldier returned from South Africa with the lower half of one leg having been amputated. He quickly ends up in poverty and vulnerable to exploitation. His employer, Jonathan Peachum, operates an extensive professional begging business; Fewkommbey is responsible for the dogs that have to be kept severely lean in order to attract the appropriate sympathy. Peachum’s capitalist ambitions lead him to invest in a corrupt enterprise to provide ships to transport military recruits to South Africa. His daughter, Polly, is courted both by a murderous crook called MacHeath and by Coax, the broker who has instigated the enterprise.

The author, Bertolt Brecht (born 10 February 1898), grew up in Augsburg, Bavaria. With his father’s support, he avoided the immediate rush of recruitment for the army by opting to study for a medical degree. He was conscripted into the army in the autumn of 1918 but his short military service was in his home city as an orderly in a military clinic for venereal diseases. Brecht’s first full-length play was written in 1918 but was not performed till 1923. His second play, Drums in the Night, was first produced in 1922 and dealt with the aftermath of the First World War. That year he was awarded Kleist Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary award. With strong socialist conviction, Brecht went into exile in early 1933 soon after the election of the Nazis to government. He wrote forty plays, several screenplays, hundreds of poems and a few works of fiction.

The central character, Fewkoombey, is not only a victim of warfare but also a victim of the society that he returns to. Though innocent, he's brought under suspicion for the murder of one of MacHeath’s shopkeepers. The court hears that logic “will not let us believe that the prosperous banker MacHeath could have murdered Mary Sawyer” and that same logic “convinces us that it must have been the penniless, brutalised ex-soldier, Fewkoombey”. The solicitor maintains that “fighting in the war... arouses in the coarser type nothing but the most brutal impulses”.