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Nevil Shute (London, January 17, 1899 – Melbourne, January 12, 1960) (full name Nevil Shute Norway) was one of the most popular novelists of the mid-20th century. His stories and characters are deeply and genuinely humane but avoid emotional extremes (occasionally to a surprising extent, given the circumstances they describe), which helps explain why, a half-century after his death, virtually all his books remain in print.

Shute's works are often adventure novels told in a very low-key but engrossing style, sometimes with an emphasis on technical areas. No Highway (1948), for example, builds drama around structure failure in an aircraft design. Several of his novels also have a supernatural element, notably Round the Bend (1951), which concerns a new religion developing around an aircraft mechanic. One of Shute's best-known books was among his last: On the Beach (1957), set in a world slowly dying from the effects of an atomic war. Its popularity is owed in part to its adaptation as a film, which Shute despised because of the liberties taken with his characters.

Biography

Born in Ealing, London, he was educated at the Dragon School, Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. Shute served in World War I as a ground-based soldier. An aeronautical engineer as well as a pilot, he began his engineering career with De Havilland Aircraft Company but, dissatisfied with the opportunities, took a position in 1924 with Vickers Ltd., where he was involved with the development of airships. Shute worked as Chief Calculator (stress engineer) on the R100 Airship project for the subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company. In 1929, he was promoted to Deputy Chief Engineer of the R100 project under Sir Barnes Wallis.

The R100 was a prototype for passenger-carrying airships that would serve the needs of Britain's global empire. R100 was a modest success, but the fatal 1930 crash of its government-funded counterpart, R101, ended Britain's interest in airships. The R100 was grounded and scrapped. Shute gives a detailed account of the episode in his 1954 autobiographical work, Autobiography of an Engineer. He left Vickers shortly afterwards, and in 1931, founded the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd.

Shute was a cousin of the Irish-American actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. In 1931, he married Frances Mary Heaton. They had two daughters. By the outbreak of World War II, Shute was already a rising novelist. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a sub-lieutenant in the Miscellaneous Weapons Department, where he experimented with secret weapons, a job that appealed to the engineer in him. His celebrity as a writer caused the Ministry of Information to send him to the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944 and later to Burma as a correspondent.

After World War II, he emigrated to Australia, decrying what he saw as a decline in his home country. Australia features in many of his later novels, including the well-known A Town Like Alice (1950). He had a brief career as a race-car driver in Australia between 1956 and 1958, driving a white XK140 Jaguar. Some of this experience found its way into his book On The Beach.

Many of his books were filmed, including Pied Piper, On the Beach (in 1959), No Highway (in 1951) and A Town Like Alice in 1956. The latter was adapted for Australian television in 1981.

He died in Melbourne in 1960.

Style and themes

The narrative backbone of a Nevil Shute novel frequently involves the planning and execution of a complex and worthwhile mission or quest. Shute's protagonists are often very ordinary people who feel a sense of responsibility and an obligation to complete a difficult task. For example:

  • An Old Captivity involves a pilot who is hired by an archaeologist to take aerial photographs of a site in Greenland. Nevil Shute takes us through the practical details: how the trip is budgeted, how the cost of the plane can be offset by the resale value at the end of the trip, how the pilot must plan for lodging and refuelling at remote locations, how he must learn to operate the aerial camera himself.

  • The framing story of A Town Like Alice (U.S. title: The Legacy) concerns business development as a moral imperative. Jean Paget, who has just inherited money, explains to her solicitor that she wants to return to Malaya, where she was a prisoner of war under the Japanese, and dig a well for the villagers who helped save her life. By the end of the book, for equally highminded (and economically hardheaded) reasons, she is operating a small shoe factory in an Australian outback town, then an ice cream parlor where the factory staff can spend their wages, then a cinema, and a few other things... and the development Jean has sparked is putting the previously dingy Willstown on track to become "a town like Alice Springs."

  • Trustee from the Toolroom concerns a British machinist, Keith Stewart, who makes a small but adequate income writing articles for a miniature model-making magazine. His wealthy sister and naval officer brother-in-law leave their young daughter with him and his wife while they take a sailing trip that they intend to end in western Canada, where they hope to settle. Their yacht is wrecked on a remote Polynesian atoll, and no trace can be found of the financial legacy they should have left their daughter. Keith realizes that they must have converted their fortune to diamonds and smuggled them out of England. (When the novel was written, it was illegal to transfer large amounts of capital out of the country). Since he helped his brother-in-law insert a sealed metal container in the concrete keel of the boat, he knows where the valuables are probably located and also that he is at least partly responsible for the disappearance of the legacy. To discharge his obligations as his niece's trustee, Keith decides that he must travel to the wreckage site and secretly recover the valuables, and his moral simplicity and determination reap vast rewards.

Shute's most famous novel, On the Beach, is one of his least characteristic: dark in tone and devoid of his usual optimism. It is set in Australia after a nuclear war has devastated the northern hemisphere, with air circulation patterns slowly bringing the fallout to the southern hemisphere. Ostensibly about nuclear war, it is really an examination of how people choose to live and prepare for death when they have certain foreknowledge of their imminent mortality.

Shute's optimism is still present in a veiled form. The tone of the book is melancholic but not at all angry. He does not envision a violent breakdown in society, his characters do not whine, rail, or riot, but simply try their best to cope with the inevitable and to "muddle through" -- though their "stiff upper lip" demeanor (very typical of Shute) is implausible and can be difficult for readers to accept. Published in 1957, the book played a role in influencing U.S. public opinion towards support of the atmospheric test ban treaty.

Nevil Shute believed Round the Bend to be his best novel. It concerns a Western-educated, half- Russian, half-Asian, aircraft mechanic, who develops a religious belief about the moral imperative of performing good maintenance on the machines on which others' lives depend. He talks with other mechanics and unintentionally becomes the leader of a religious movement. His employer (the point-of-view character) is inconvenienced by crowds of pilgrims, but comes to respect the movement.

Belief in private enterprise

Nevil Shute's novels frequently present private enterprise (along with firm self-reliance and individual responsibility) as a source of moral good. In this respect, he is advocating a theme found, more commonly, in some examples of American 1950's literature. Novels such as Ayn Rand's, 'Atlas Shrugged' or Cameron Hawley's 'Executive Suite' and 'Cash McCall' present the businessman as a value-creating hero who adds wealth to the human experience.

A Town Like Alice is a characteristic example. Jean Paget, who has been working as a secretary in a pleasant, but uninspiring, job, has just received a substantial legacy from her uncle. She ponders what she should do, now that she no longer needs to work. The following exchange, as described by her solicitor, Noel Strachan, flashes by almost as an aside but is key to Jean's character and the story:

I knew of several charitable appeals who would have found a first-class shorthand-typist, unpaid, a perfect godsend, and I told her so. She was inclined to be critical about those. "Surely, if a thing is really worth while, it'll pay," she said. She evidently had quite a strong business instinct latent in her. "It wouldn't need to have an unpaid secretary."

"Charitable organizations like to keep the overheads down," I remarked.

"I shouldn't have thought organizations that haven't got enough margin to pay a secretary can possibly do very much good," she said. "If I'm going to work at anything, I want it to be something really worthwhile."

This philosophy also permeates Ruined City (1938; U.S. title: Kindling), which concerns a wealthy and respected banker who lifts a town out of the depression by bringing a ship-building concern back to life through money, bribery, and questionable financial dealings. His reputation is destroyed, and he goes to jail for fraud, but the shipyard is back in business and the town is saved. When he has served his sentence, he returns to the town and finds a bronze plaque on the shipyard gate with his head and shoulders embossed on it and the words

HENRY WARREN
1934
HE GAVE US WORK

Bibliography

External links

1899 births | 1960 deaths | English Australians | English racecar drivers | English engineers | English novelists | English aviators | Australian writers | Old Dragons | Londoners | Former students of Balliol College, Oxford | Old Salopians

Nevil Shute | Nevil Shute | נוויל שוט | Nevil Shute | ネビル・シュート | Nevil Shute | Nevil Shute

 

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