Drugs, murder, espionage, politics and deception - all too common themes in modern writing, do I hear you say? Probably so, but in this case they appear in Marazan, a 1926 novel by a mild, academic and gently self effacing author.
Who? Nevil Shute - a man who told stories.
Nevil Shute Norway was born in England in 1899 in Ealing, when that London suburb was still very close to the countryside. As a child he became very interested in aeroplanes, an interest that was to last his whole life through. He tells in Slide Rule (autobiography) of his first prep school and his unhappiness there. The young Nevil stammered and his master and naturally the other boys were unsympathetic. Probably more than unsympathetic. Eventually he absented himself from school, spending two weeks looking around at the Science Museum instead of at school. As a result, he was then sent to another school, named Lynams, a coeducational prep school, with at that time about a hundred and twenty boys and ten or so girls. Here he settled in happily and appears to have enjoyed the rest of his education. Lynams appears to have been an excellent school for the time, with many of its students of both sexes distinguishing themselves later in life.
In 1912 Nevil’s father went to Ireland to work as Secretary of the Post Office, and the two Norway boys continued their education. Fred, three years older than Nevil, was killed, at the age of nineteen, in World War l. Although Shute says little about his brother, it is clear he admired him immensely, and after his death felt he himself was likely also to be killed during the war. Instead, during 1916, he was caught up in the Easter Uprising in Dublin, where he was a stretcher bearer during the hostilities.
Later, he did train as a soldier although he would much rather have become an airman, and spent the last months of the war helping guard the mouth of the Thames estuary. During demobilization he was trained in clerical duties. More enjoyably, he acquainted himself with a grounded Sopwith Camel, studying the controls and making sure he knew how everything functioned. Even at this time, Shute displayed the love of planes and aviation matters that surrounded him all his life. He also went yachting and learned a great deal about seamanship, another area that he wrote about very knowledgeably in many of his books.
He went on to take Engineering at Oxford and commenced work with deHavillands, at that time a very small company. In 1923 Nevil Shute learned to fly, and after nine hours of dual instruction was allowed to go solo, which he says was about average for those times. In 1924 he left deHavillands and went to work as Chief Calculator for Vickers, involved in the development of airships. Interestingly, it was not felt at that time that there was any future in commercial air flight, as in aeroplanes, and that airships were the way to go. How times change!
In Slide Rule, an autobiography, mostly concerned with the part of his life between World Wars l and ll, he spends a lot of time describing the work he did in the 1920s. He speaks of his involvement at Howden with the development of a rigid bodied airship known simply as the R100. This vessel was tested and then flown successfully across the Atlantic to and from Canada. It took more than five years to construct and test.
However, after the fatal crash of the R101, developed in parallel to the R100 but by a government group, the future of airships in Britain was doomed. Shute details the complexities of maths and engineering necessary to raise the giant airship from the ground - and more importantly to put it back down again safely - in a most readable and engaging manner.
Quite casually through this autobiography he mentions writing and having published some of his books. Just as casually - although with clear pleasure - he talks about at least one of them being filmed. Discussing the fact that he wrote under his first two names rather than his full name, he expresses the belief that people might have felt less inclined to regard his engineering skill with the same respect and confidence if they knew him to be a writer of adventure stories. He felt that Vickers might not have considered a person who wrote - an amusement which he say he turned to 'as other people turn to playing Patience' - as a 'serious enough person' for their employment.
I don't believe, at least in the period of time covered by Slide Rule, that he genuinely regarded himself as an author. First and foremost, he was a mathematical engineer. He spends almost as little time talking about his family life. He mentions his wife and the fact that she is a doctor, and later says they had two daughters, but says very little else about them. He was modestly unassuming about his own work, both in the production of the R100, his writing and in the aeroplane building company (Airspeed Ltd) he formed in 1931 and ran for many years afterwards.
During World War ll Shute joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, but shortly into training he was, as he tells it, 'pulled out of the squad and asked some awkward questions about my previous career and experience', whereupon he was sent to an Admiralty office to spend the remainder of the war working on the design of unconventional weapons. It is likely his experience here served him well for later books such as Pastoral, Most Secret and The Chequer Board.
Several of Shute's books have been filmed, among them Lonely Road, Pied Piper, No Highway, On the Beach and A Town Like Alice. Mini series have been made of the last two and also The Far Country. The mini series A Town Like Alice was excellent; about the more recently screened version of On the Beach, I think the less said the better! Others may have been filmed; if so I regret omitting mention of them. He did write a film play entitled Vinland the Good, about which however I know nothing.
Pied Piper was listed for study when I was at high school, and it was my first introduction to the writing of this gentle and unassuming man who saw himself more as an scientist and aviation worker than as an author. Although I don't recall enjoying the book all that much at the time, I reread it a number of years later, this time with more pleasure. It was written in the same straight forward narrative style that marked all his books. Reading them was like having a enjoyable chat with a slightly old fashioned and courteous gentleman, recalling interesting incidents of his life.
Frequently he made use of the method of writing in the first person. I find the titles of some of his books intriguing. Often a short quote at the beginning gives the source of such titles. They range through Rupert Brooke, T.S. Eliot and Walter Raleigh to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Edward Fitzgerald).
Marazan, his first novel, was published in 1926. He says in an Author's note to the reissue of the book in the 1960s that it was 'rewritten through from start to finish three times, so that it took me about eighteen months.' He admits he knew very little about the topics of 'murder, detection and prison' and that many young writers who have 'not yet learnt the nature of drama' write, as he did, about such matters.
Clearly he did however know the value of 'edit, edit, edit....'! It is interesting, in this age when just about any word is acceptable in writing, that Shute was informed by the publishers of Marazan that "The House of Cassell does not print the word 'bloody'," whereupon the word was changed to 'ruddy'!How times DO change!
Shute mentions in Slide Rule that had he known at the time that a future as a writer awaited him, he might have quit engineering at an early age. He feels that had he done so, his life would have been the poorer for it. I feel that had he quit early, he would not have possessed the knowledge and familiarity with aeroplanes particularly that made his books such plain good reading. His books are essentially stories about men - often aviators, engineers and ordinary men - characters drawn from his own life - who often came to know more about themselves through events and people around them.
If Shute had a failing, it was (in my opinion) his frequent inability to create believable and sympathetic female characters. Often the females in his books tended to be shallow, simple minded and even stupid. Far too often he used the terms 'the girl and 'the woman'. I find I can overlook that, as I overlook the way his characters speak of 'Dagoes', 'Wogs' and 'Abos'. Although these terms are now sexist and outdated, they are relevant in the perspective of his stories and the times in which they were written. Although Nevil Shute Norway was very much an Englishman, his books are seldom marked with any jingoistic sense of national superiority. In The Chequer Board it is in fact the expatriate English airman who has 'gone native' and 'let the side down' who is actually a stronger, wiser and more human person because of his preparedness to adapt the ways of another country, without disdaining them simply because they are 'not English'.
Nevil Shute came to Australia in 1948 for two months, and this was a visit that inspired A Town Like Alice. In this book, he tells of a group of English women, caught in Singapore when the Japanese invaded during World War ll. This he based on a real life happening. As the writer 'speaks' to the reader, looking back into the past, both can see the great events in which these characters have participated, although they have been unaware of it themselves. Jean Paget, in this book, is one of those rare strong and well drawn female characters Shute was able to create. Others include Jennifer Morton in The Far Country and both Mollie and Mrs Regan in Beyond the Black Stump.
In spite of his unfortunate lack of well developed women characters, Shute's books abound with well drawn males and good adventure plots. His writing is knowledgeable and convincing and his heroes generally quiet, thoughtful and rational men. Where there is action, it is subdued rather than 'exciting'. If you are looking for the all out (not to mention generally unbelievable!) wild action of a James Bond spy story, look elsewhere!
Shute ventured into the realms of fantasy and science fiction in such books as An Old Captivity, In the Wet and On the Beach. The latter presents a depressing image of the doomed inhabitants of Australia, waiting it out after a nuclear holocaust destroys life in the rest of the world. In the Wet raises the idea of reincarnation, a topic also mentioned briefly in The Chequer Board.
In Round the Bend, he tells the story of Tom Cutter, an Englishman who has made a success of an air freight business operating out of Bahrein. One of his employs and friends, Connie Shak Lin, is responsible for encouraging a moral stance by other workers, teaching them of the responsibilities of their work. Shak Lin's fame spreads, until he is revered by aviation workers throughout the middle East and the Orient. As young men, they had worked together, and Tom had found this attitude by others difficult to comprehend. At the end, although he does not believe it, he knows that many of Shak Lin's followers believe he was the personification of the deity, and feels honoured and privileged that if this is so, he may 'have walked and talked with God.'
Sentimental and old fashioned in this day and age to imagine such a possibility? Decide for yourself. Personally, I consider it a beautiful book.
Later he and his family migrated to Australia, where he lived until his death in 1960. Nevil Shute may never be remembered as a creator of Great Literature, but he will be remembered as a great teller of stories.
Nevil Shute's books:
If I am aware of alternative titles for any, I have included them.
Stephen Morris and Pilotage (published in 1960 as Stephen Morris, but written in the early 1920s; hence are Shute's first books. These may be the two he mentions in Slide Rule as being not publishable.)
Marazan 1926
So Disdained 1928 (Known in the United Stated as The Mysterious Aviator)
Lonely Road 1932
Ruined City 1938 (Known in the United States as Kindling)
What Happened to the Corbetts 1939
An Old Captivity 1940
Landfall 1940
Pied Piper 1942
Pastoral 1944
Most Secret 1945
The Chequer Board 1947
No Highway 1948
A Town Like Alice 1950 (Known in the United States as The Legacy)
Round the Bend 1951
The Far Country 1952
In the Wet 1953
Slide Rule 1954 This is an autobiography, at least of part of Shute's life
Requiem for a Wren 1955 (also printed as The Breaking Wave)
Beyond the Black Stump 1956
On the Beach 1957
The Rainbow and the Rose 1958
Trustee From the Toolroom 1960
Film Play: Vinland the Good Source material and References: All of the above! (Excepting the last item)