The general opinion is that you should broach Nevil Shute with Pied Piper 'An old man rescues seven children (one of them the niece of a Gestapo officer) from France during the Nazi invasion.'
It is with this novel that he became popular. Whatever the problems we might face in the reading of it today, it has his signature ease and gentle glow:
Pretty much all of Nevil Shute is comfort reading for me, and this one even more than the others. Some of his books are problematic on race, class and gender issues, and even with due allowance for him being ahead of his own time, that can make them jarring to read now. Pied Piper doesn’t have any of these problems, and it’s pretty much the ideal place to start reading Shute...
It’s the story of an elderly Englishman caught in France at the beginning of the invasion who escapes back to Britain with a slowly growing group of children of multiple ethnicities. (Two English, one French, one Belgian, one Dutch, one Polish Jew, one German of mixed German and Jewish ancestry.) It has a buried love story, it has perilous escapes, it has more means of transportation than almost anything. It’s also unusual in having a hero who is an old widower with a heart condition who is fond of fishing...
It’s gentle and cheering and absorbing — even though I know it extremely well, I can’t put it down once I start it. It’s quite short — 253 pages in the 1970 Pan edition I own. I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than a few hours to read it straight through.
The film version is called Crossing to Freedom:
In a nutshell:
Pied Piper is a poignant tale of love and loss and the loneliness of old age. It displays Nevil Shute's prose at its sparest and most effective, and is sure to win new fans for many years to come.
Most Secret 'Unconventional attacks on German forces during WWII, using a French fishing boat.' - Wikipedia
The book was censored for many years - the name becomes so appropriate in retrospect!
Nevil Shute based much of Most Secret here, and it was so accurate it was censored until after the war!
Time and again, it is brought to our notice that Nevil Shute displayed some sort of prescience:
Books such as this were written in part to demonstrate that the democracies' war effort was powered by ordinary people who saw their duty, and many of them were just cardboard characters. Nevil Shute's artistic skill has made his characters into real people, and has provided the motivations that are necessary for the successful employment of such a horrible but limited weapon. I presume that when Shute wrote this novel he had no accurate, if any, information about the gas chambers and ovens of the German death camps, information which did not surface until the spring of 1945. For us, who know of these things, Genevieve's secret weapon is a presentiment of what became history.
Next we have Pastoral 'Crew relations and love at an airbase in rural surroundings in wartime England.' - Wikipedia
Sadly, for this book, the Amazon preview is all I can offer:
It’s a peaceful breath of happiness and loveliness and optimism in the middle of a terrifying time in history. Like Shute’s books A Town Like Alice and The Pied Piper, it’s also a celebration of people who are both utterly ordinary and utterly extraordinary in their kindness and heroism during extraordinary times. This is a great comfort read about a couple who are comfortable friends as well as enthusiastic lovers. Just be prepared to read a lot of scenes about fishing.
And that's in contrast to the fact that it's a war novel of sorts:
Published in 1944, Pastoral is set at an air force base in Oxfordshire during the Second World War. Though centered around the romance between Flight Lieutenant Peter Marshall and WAAF Section Officer Gervase Robertson, what the book does particularly well is give a sense of how bomber crews and those supporting them at command experienced the war.
Tomorrow we glance at The Seafarers, The Chequer Board and No Highway. As I mentioned before, the film based on the last one was very enjoyable and I hope that there will be more material on the other two books too.
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