I'm fairly certain I read What Happened to the Corbetts 'U.S Title: Ordeal. Foretells the German bombing of Southampton early in WWII.' - Wikipedia
Use the Preview function on the Amazon cover below to see how it reads:
nevilshute.org is a marvellous tribute and resource and I will use sections to bring out the specifics of his books and to enhance reading pleasure. Trivia is never to be scorned.
An Old Captivity doesn't ring a bell for me - sounds good though:
Invitation to Read:
Flying Summary
An element of reincarnation is probably suggested in the book.
Landfall: A Channel Story 'A young RAF pilot and a British barmaid fall in love. His career suffers a setback when he is thought to have sunk a British submarine in error, but he is vindicated.'
This book has the privilege of a George Orwell review!
There is no lack nowadays of clever writers; the trouble is that such writers are so cut off from the life of their time as to be unable to write about ordinary people. A “distinguished” modern novel almost always has some kind of artist or near-artist as its hero. There is, however, one experience that happens to nearly all human beings alike, and that is war. The “intellectual” has a chance of seeing war at close quarters as he will never see, for instance, stockbroking or marine insurance, and good war-books are in consequence fairly common. The present war, owing to its peculiar character, has not yet produced a literature of its own, but Mr Nevil Shute’s Landfall is a beginning. It is a straightforward, convincing story
And there is the movie!
The plot appears sufficiently inviting:
Use the Preview function on the Amazon cover below to see how it reads:
His daughter's reviews are there. There are those which came earlier as well as her later reviews of the same books:
In What Happened To The Corbetts Dad foretold the German bombing of England, but this was not his main motivator. My Mother was a doctor of medicine and when it was obvious that there would be a war, she worked with the local authorities to prepare people for gas attacks. Dad was enraged because he realized that the prevailing winds would bring the gas westward to Germany itself and that therefore they would be unlikely to use it. He wrote Corbetts as a reaction to that.
Blended with diverse reviews by others:
The book is decidedly un-dramatic in its depictions of the hardships the family goes through, and in that lies its worth. Shute describes well the isolation and forced independence of people suffering a major disaster. The reality is relatively mundane and a major test of one's patience.Flying Summary: What Happened To The Corbetts - Obviously, many Nevil Shute novels focus on aircraft. After all he was an aeronautical engineer. This page offers a table of the aeronautical content in the book:
| Aircraft: | Unspecified Bombers, implied to be German; RAF Low wing monoplane fighters; Unspecified carrier-borne naval aircraft |
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In 1938 Shute writes What Happened To The Corbetts and says HMS Hood is sunk "in a battle as big as (World War One's Battle of) Jutland." To a 1930s audience this was an unthinkable disaster. In 1941 HMS Hood was sunk by a single shot from the Bismarck. In fact, the site has a section called What Did Nevil Shute Norway Actually Believe? What Happened to the Corbetts is in fact prophecy about how modern warfare will affect civilian populations, affecting even how they behave morally. It has as its prologue a verse from Psalm 45: -Good luck have thou with thine honour ride on, because of the word of truth,of meekness, and righteousness;and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things. |
An Old Captivity doesn't ring a bell for me - sounds good though:
Most of the book concerns the details of setting up an archaeological expedition to Greenland (in the late thirties). Shute was always interested in technology and planes and flying, and here he makes the seaplane and the photography seem absolutely real. Running alongside that is the archaeology — the Norse settlement of Greenland, the possible Celtic settlement. We learn a lot about these things slowly and in a very science fictional way before the book plunges outright into fantasy with the pilot’s dream of the discovery of Vinland, vindicated, within the novel, by his recognising geography he had never visited and locating a stone carved with runes.
The Amazon cover offers a preview:
As seen above, nevilshute.org supplies various resources:
Invitation to Read:
An Old Captivity has long been one of my favourite Shute novels. In a way it's an experimental sort of book: it takes the long wide arc of a journey from Britain to Canada via Iceland and Greenland as its background. The path of a small seaplane is traced with infinite pains to capture the solitude and the arduous nature of the voyage. Its three passengers are linked together in interesting and diverse ways. Slowly, against the further background of the Icelandic sagas, the tale emerges, and as usual with Nevil Shute it is not what we are expecting. Just when the clean, crisp, almost mechanical prose has us thinking one thing, Shute leaps off into a void composed of history and imagination. It's an extremely disciplined piece of writing and I hope you'll enjoy the ride.
Art and Joan Cornell, while digging in their Cape Cod garden near the site of the seaplane landing in An Old Captivity, were delighted to come upon the Haki/Hekja stone described by Nevil Shute in An Old captivity.Also:
Interested in the Viking sagas, Shute wrote his sixth novel, An Old Captivity, about the Vikings discovering Cape Cod. It is set in the 1930s and is about an archeologist who explores the Viking sites on Greenland. He hires a pilot to take him there from England in a seaplane. The pilot, overworked and under great stress, cannot sleep so he takes sleeping pills and dreams about Leif Ericsson and two Viking slaves, Haki and Hekja.
Rather than fly back to England by way of Iceland they fly down to Labrador and then to Cape Cod. The pilot said "I've been here before" and lands the plane on Prince Cove in Marston Mills. On shore he finds the stone he had dreamt about and where it had been left a thousand years before. On the stone were the names of Haki and Hekja who were written about in the Viking Sagas.
Flying Summary
| Aviation Activities | Test flight from Southampton Water Long range transit flight to Greenland Maintaining the aircraft in the open. Reconnaissances and Aerial Photographic Surveys Long range transit flight to Nova Scotia |
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An element of reincarnation is probably suggested in the book.
Landfall: A Channel Story 'A young RAF pilot and a British barmaid fall in love. His career suffers a setback when he is thought to have sunk a British submarine in error, but he is vindicated.'
This book has the privilege of a George Orwell review!
There is no lack nowadays of clever writers; the trouble is that such writers are so cut off from the life of their time as to be unable to write about ordinary people. A “distinguished” modern novel almost always has some kind of artist or near-artist as its hero. There is, however, one experience that happens to nearly all human beings alike, and that is war. The “intellectual” has a chance of seeing war at close quarters as he will never see, for instance, stockbroking or marine insurance, and good war-books are in consequence fairly common. The present war, owing to its peculiar character, has not yet produced a literature of its own, but Mr Nevil Shute’s Landfall is a beginning. It is a straightforward, convincing story
Here, too, we find his uncanny ability to either predict or depict the times:
No wonder the censors had Shute in their sights by the time he wrote Most Secret. He must have already been sailing close to the wind using real events actually happening on the real dates in heavily censored wartime Britain. However it's possible nobody noticed with Landfall but became wary with Most Secret.
And there is the movie!
His characters are also heroic and willing to sacrifice themselves. In Landfall: A Channel Story, a young test pilot volunteers to test a new type of plane to be shot off the deck of an aircraft carrier. The government has pressed for the testing, and although badly injured, the pilot manages to survive to tell the developers what they ought to do to make the new plane work. Although young, the pilot is heroic in his determination that the tests must not fail, lest the war itself be lost.
Tomorrow's lot includes the better known Pied Piper. I know that this series is a bit of a trudge but it is for the benefit of those who might once have loved Nevil Shute's writings and wish to catch up and know more. These posts are also to lure those who have never tried one of his novels - if even one such has now read a Nevil Shute, I would be delighted!
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