Posted by Peter Ceresole on February 20, 2006 at 11:19:09 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Bawdsey Radio Masts posted by Jock on February 20, 2006 at 09:23:39:
Completing the book in 1937, I see AR as deliberately warping time and adding the masts as a sinister symbol of the impending war.
It's an idea that has great resonance, but I suspect that it's largely hindsight. In 1937 radar, in spite of the towers, was an extremely well kept secret- we didn't realise the Germans had it (on the whole technically much better than ours at the time) and they didn't realise that we had it (with a superb reporting system that turned out to fit the coming battle). Even if he had kept up his intelligence contacts, such as they were, AR is unlikely to have much inkling of what the towers were for.
On the other hand, 'Things to Come' with its prophetic (and fortunately wrong) images of aerial attack was in the making, so maybe they were a generalised symbol of threat after all.
But your idea is so rich in looming and impending doom that, in the spirit of novel writing, it deserves to be true.