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Deliberately Engineered

It is over fifty years since the death of Nevil Shute, who from 1940 to 1960 was probably the best-selling novelist in Britain. You could hardly not read Shute in those days. I devoured him voraciously (I am 68), as did my brother, friends, mother, uncles and aunts. Yet who under the age of 60 remembers him now? If he survives at all it is through reprints on the shelves of charity shops and memories of old black-and-white films culled from his best-known books: No Highway, A Town Like Alice, On the Beach.

He was an unusual character to take up a writing career. He read little fiction and once said in an interview, ‘I have little respect for writers as a class.’ Shute was an engineer. He worked for the de Havilland Aircraft Company (quite possibly fitting the apocryphal profile: ‘You can always tell an old de Havilland man, but you can’t tell him very much’), then for an airship project, and then with his own successful outfit building planes. His almost unreadable (except perhaps to engineers) partial autobiography, Slide Rule, recounts these early exploits in loving detail. Throughout his life he was obsessed with planes and boats which – like his other passion, travel – figure strongly in most of the novels.

In becoming unfashionable after his death Shute followed the profile of many old-style ‘entertainment’ writers. His characters rarely progressed beyond wooden representations. He didn’t do humour. Above all he didn’t do sex or immorality. (His biographer, Julian Smith, reported that Shute had never written a story in which a married man had had an affair.) Shute made no secret of the fact that he wrote to a formula: to please his readers. He believed that what they wanted was information (based on good research), a love story and a happy ending. He wrote in a serviceable prose dotted with fam

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It is over fifty years since the death of Nevil Shute, who from 1940 to 1960 was probably the best-selling novelist in Britain. You could hardly not read Shute in those days. I devoured him voraciously (I am 68), as did my brother, friends, mother, uncles and aunts. Yet who under the age of 60 remembers him now? If he survives at all it is through reprints on the shelves of charity shops and memories of old black-and-white films culled from his best-known books: No Highway, A Town Like Alice, On the Beach.

He was an unusual character to take up a writing career. He read little fiction and once said in an interview, ‘I have little respect for writers as a class.’ Shute was an engineer. He worked for the de Havilland Aircraft Company (quite possibly fitting the apocryphal profile: ‘You can always tell an old de Havilland man, but you can’t tell him very much’), then for an airship project, and then with his own successful outfit building planes. His almost unreadable (except perhaps to engineers) partial autobiography, Slide Rule, recounts these early exploits in loving detail. Throughout his life he was obsessed with planes and boats which – like his other passion, travel – figure strongly in most of the novels. In becoming unfashionable after his death Shute followed the profile of many old-style ‘entertainment’ writers. His characters rarely progressed beyond wooden representations. He didn’t do humour. Above all he didn’t do sex or immorality. (His biographer, Julian Smith, reported that Shute had never written a story in which a married man had had an affair.) Shute made no secret of the fact that he wrote to a formula: to please his readers. He believed that what they wanted was information (based on good research), a love story and a happy ending. He wrote in a serviceable prose dotted with familiar mannerisms. Characters ‘wrinkled their brows’ and had ‘clear grey eyes’. They spoke ‘steadily’, or ‘slowly’, or ‘gravely’. A male character would be ‘desperately tired’ or stare at the heroine ‘dumbly’, or ‘notice the curve of her throat as it slid down into her dress’. All this may sound as if Shute’s novels should be consigned without qualms to the bin. Not so. Some of the effects he managed have been mislaid by today’s writers, and made him – for all the faults – a man who is much missed in the art of story-telling. His craft is perhaps best explored through the novel Ruined City which, published in 1938, has scarcely ever been mentioned in discussions of Shute’s work and yet seems to me the most appealing thing he wrote. Ruined City is set in 1933–4, in a markedly pre-war, pre-welfarestate England. The main character, Warren, is a banker. By page 30 his life is falling apart. His wife is having an affair with a rich Arab. We see a dinner-jacketed Warren dining alone in his big house, waited on by gossiping servants. But it is work that the book is really about: ‘He had worked hard for fifteen years and had got nothing, it seemed to him, that was worth having.’ This is a key sentence, though it takes Warren – and us – some time to become aware of it. Troubled by an intermittent pain in the gut, Warren decides he is out of condition, and on impulse gets the chauffeur to drive up north and leave him by the roadside for some days of cross country walking. But Warren is not just unfit; he has a serious stomach problem which lands him in hospital in a place called Sharples, a former shipbuilding town that has fallen on hard times during a national slump. As Warren recuperates from an operation, he notes that half the men in the ward do not. It has to be explained to him that people who are too poor to eat properly lack the power of recovery. The almoner of the hospital is a woman and, of course, Warren begins to form an attachment to her. He returns to London, buys up Sharples’ derelict shipyard for a song, and begins plotting how to bring work back to it. The trouble is, respectable companies will not place orders with a non-functioning yard. Warren can only do it by putting out a dishonest prospectus. He goes to an unspecified east European country and, with the surprising help of a night-club ‘dancer’, drums up some starter business for Sharples. This approach causes him some personal difficulties which I will not reveal for fear of spoiling the novel’s ending. Despite its pre-war setting, Ruined City seems in some respects a remarkably topical book, with its study of a slump, unemployment, a miscreant banker, and the central theme of high finance versus ‘real work’ (i.e. manufacturing). In one way it was an unusual subject for Shute, who was a cradle Tory and a rabid critic of Labour governments; but it was also about his familiar themes of business and engineering, and boats, and the little man (though Warren isn’t that little) fighting the system. One immediately striking feature is the slow unfolding of the plot; the sense of being in the hands of a story-teller who, once he has the reader’s attention, will carry him helplessly unresisting to the end of the book. Shute prided himself on research, and was an early exponent of inserting an accumulation of detail into his novels. What sounds tiresome in outline is transformed by some alchemic process into passages that are surprisingly readable. As Warren’s chauffeur drives him north, for instance, a litany of place names is rehearsed: ‘The car moved through Mayfair, up Orchard Street and Baker Street, past Lord’s and the Swiss Cottage on to Finchley. A light rain was falling . . .’ and so on, all the way up to Darlington. Boring? In fact, the four-page description of this journey is curiously touching. Shute knew people and what interested them. Ruined City has many qualities, but its characterization is only partially successful. Warren is quite well drawn, but the women are typical Shute ciphers: idealized and virtuous. The almoner, for example. ‘When we get in smoother water,’ she tells Warren at one point, ‘I’ll expect a bit more than talk about your companies.’ This is as near as Shute comes to portraying sex. The other woman in the novel – Pepita, the east European nightclub dancer – is a different case. Pepita is a ‘dancer’ in the sense that Mimi in La Bohème is a ‘seamstress’. But though Warren sees a lot of her and eventually hands over a large sum of money for ‘services rendered’, his behaviour is always beyond reproach. The bureaucrat whom Warren must square to win his shipping contract demands as a bribe a priceless artefact: an umbrella with a jewel-encrusted handle. Asked if there is anything else he needs, the man says he’d like a case of Worcester sauce. One racks one’s brains to think of anything else approaching a joke in the Shute oeuvre. Shute said that the public wanted happy endings, and happy endings was what he gave them, yet the defining impression given by his books is one of sadness. And though most of the writer’s effects were deliberately engineered, I fancy that this one was not intentional. Shute was a highly successful man in two separate careers, yet we know surprisingly little about him. The sole biography uncovered next to nothing concerning its subject beyond the bare bones of a career. It seems probable that the melancholy emanating from his uniquely flavoured books, and acting like a doleful drug upon the reading public, had some foundation in his personal life, but it is unlikely now that its precise nature will ever be known. By accident or design the writer has succeeded in thoroughly covering his tracks. The closing pages of Ruined City are no exception to the rule of sadness. Here is another ‘happy ending’, yet on each of my three perusals of the novel – spanning fifty years – I have finished it in tears.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © David Spiller 2011


About the contributor

David Spiller has himself been accused of gloominess, but maintains that it is merely a defence mechanism.

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