Abstract EN:

In his fiction, Colin MacInnes (1914-1976) accusingly points his finger at all the survivals from Victorian ideology in post-war Britain, while celebrating new ways of life, sometimes marginal ones, which puritan moralists would have frowned upon. The writer takes the sacred aura from major institutions such as the army or the police, breaks the ideal picture of the Allies, still covered with glory, turns upside down ancient space and time patterns by introducing lunacy and perversion in the pastoral world of rural Australia. His text juxtaposes the idioms of Commonwealth Blacks, the underworld, and teenagers, unifying the former colonial space. Nevertheless, men are kept apart by their origins, and the unity of that world is constantly threatened. An analysis inspired by both anarchism and Calvinism, ascribing the responsibility of social evils to the state, which deprives the individual from his own judgement, is put forward, but the only antidote to the pessimism engendered by man's violence and greed is the pleasure that the writer gives through his processions of burlesque characters.