With two popular tales and one that has not pleased some reviewers, we come to the end of the Nevil Shute series. The first one here is set in the back of beyond...
Now, we can move beyond that stump to On the Beach
'Culture clash is the subject of "Beyond the Black Stump", set in the American northwest in 1954, where people think of themselves as pioneers, and Western Australia, where they are. The hero is Stanton Laird, an American geologist who has worked all over the world for the Topeka Exploration Company, most recently in Arabia. As the story opens, he is vacationing in his home town of Hazel, Oregon.'
You can preview the book from the Amazon cover below:
'The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere following a nuclear war a year previously. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently.'
“On the Beach” is however unlike many other post-apocalyptic novels (except “The Road”) due to its ending. Many movies and dark novels of today that remark upon the end of the human race enjoy teasing the reader and viewer with last-minute twists and deus ex machina’s such as in the movies “Children of Men” and “The Book of Eli” and McCarthy’s novel-made-film “The Road”. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does muddle the waters between grey realism and optimistic fantasy.
Shute’s novel here ends like the poet T.S. Elliot wrote, “Not with a bang, but a whimper.” As the lethal clouds of radiation go south, the scene of the world goes silent and the characters that are left take their cyanide pills and die. The world gradually eases into oblivion and silence in Shute’s vision, and as the reader we are left with a sense of both fear and dread that this is a possible future for the world if humanity spirals into the chaos of war once again.
Some critics complained that the book's resolutely low-key depiction of human extinction was unconvincing: people just wouldn't die that way. Yet readers identified readily with the characters' quiet dignity. This conventional novel about unconventional weapons became "the most influential work of its kind for the next quarter of a century and the only one most people ever read"
Waltzing Matilda - On The Beach (1959)
“It frightened the hell out of me. I’m still frightened.”
These words mark the reaction of a young Australian named Helen Caldicott to a story of the aftermath of mistaken nuclear war, in which those who never even took sides were faced with the slow advance of deadly nuclear radiation on their shores. On the Beach, first a best-selling novel and then a major Hollywood film, confronts the viewer with a number of questions: How would you behave if—in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse—you knew you only have a few weeks or months left to live? Would you carouse riotously, knowing the end is near? Deny that the entire thing is happening? Hope against all logic for a miraculous reprieve? Try to maintain a core of decency in the face of imminent death? Wish that you had done something long ago to prevent nuclear war in the first place?
And now for another one about which readers have not exactly raved:
The Rainbow and the Rose 'One man's three love stories; narration shifts from the narrator to the main character and back.'
Preview it as I have no link to the book, alas - but then there are those who lump it with the Beyond book that we've glanced at above:
The Rainbow and the Rose 'One man's three love stories; narration shifts from the narrator to the main character and back.'
Preview it as I have no link to the book, alas - but then there are those who lump it with the Beyond book that we've glanced at above:
“The Rainbow and the Rose” (1958) has pilot Ronnie Clarke, trying to save retired senior Johnnie Pascoe who has crashed on a medical evacuation mission and is seriously injured, dream about the latter’s chequered life while resting overnight in Pascoe’s house after his first attempt to land a doctor there fails.
I love the stories of Nevil Shute. He describes things beautifully and doesn’t hurry through the telling. He takes care to build very human characters in interesting and believable situations that reveal their best qualities. His male characters are decent, kind and hardworking. His female characters are intelligent and hardworking, as well. I enjoyed reading The Rainbow and the Rose for exactly those reasons.
Trustee from the Toolroom appears to be well liked for many reasons.
Trustee from the Toolroom is a tremendously compelling and well-plotted adventure story from 1960 about a mild-mannered English columnist for a hobbyist magazine called Miniature Mechanic who is duty bound to recover a container of valuable jewels from his dead brother's wrecked yacht in the South Pacific. (Fun fact from Wikipedia: "Trustee from the Toolroom was voted #27 on the Modern Library Readers' list of the top 100 novels.
Shute's books are low-key, but his plots are assembled like Swiss watches -- every piece fits perfectly, and you simply can't put one down after you're 50 pages into it. They also contain astounding technical realism -- far more than you'd think could hold his readers' attention, much less keep them spellbound.
An academic paper examines how appropriate this author was for the times:
Both in his own right and as a representative figure he deserves analysis on account of his part in the literary re-statement of what has fairly been called the ‘imperial idea,’ that matrix of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes which had sustained and rationalized the endeavors of several generations of politicians, publicists, and civil servants, but whose relevance to Great Britain's circumstances after the Second World War was increasingly open to doubt.
Reactions apart, Nevil Shute's novels continue to be engaging. Here is list of important links for avid fans of Nevil Shute:
All that's left is for you to read this Pied Piper of a novelist on a beach, perhaps in a town like Alice or in a toolroom, with a rainbow and a rose.
After this long ramble through nostalgia, the blog returns to the here and now with upcoming posts featuring reviews of three recently read novels - A Paul Theroux and two Nordic Noir thrillers.
No comments:
Post a Comment