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Nevil Shute

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Nevil Shute
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(born Jan. 17, 1899, Ealing, Middlesex, Eng. — died Jan. 12, 1960, Melbourne, Vic., Australia) English-born Australian novelist. Trained as an aeronautical engineer, Shute drew on technical detail in his fiction. His early works include So Disdained (1928) and What Happened to the Corbetts (1939), a foretaste of the bombing of civilians in World War II. After the war he settled in Australia, where he set his later novels. Reflecting a growing despair about the future of humanity, they include A Town Like Alice (1950; film, 1956) and his best-known work, On The Beach (1957; film, 1959), a vivid picture of the nuclear annihilation of the human race.

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Columbia Encyclopedia: Nevil Shute
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Shute, Nevil (Nevil Shute Norway), 1899-1960, English novelist, b. Ealing, Middlesex, grad. Oxford, 1922. After serving in World War I, he was manager of a construction company until 1938. He fought also in World War II and emigrated to Australia in 1950. Shute wrote 26 novels and was one the best-selling novelists of his era. His fast-paced novels usually illustrate moral themes. They include Ordeal (1939), The Pied Piper (1944), On the Beach (1957), and Trustee from the Toolroom (1960).
Dictionary: Shute   (shūt) pronunciation, Nevil
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(Pen name of Nevil Shute Norway.) 1899-1960.

British writer whose novels include A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957), both set in Australia.


Writer: Nevil Shute
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  • Born: in Ealing, London, England
  • Died: in Melbourne, Australia
  • Occupation: Writer
  • Active: '40s-'50s, '80s
  • Major Genres: Drama, Romance
  • Career Highlights: On the Beach, The Pied Piper, A Town Like Alice
  • First Major Screen Credit: Scotland Yard Commands (1936)

Biography

An aeronautical engineer by training, Nevil Shute's literary career bookended years spent working for aircraft manufacturers such as DeHavilland and founding his own aircraft company. His full name was Nevil Shute Norway and both of his parents were published writers, in addition to his father being a British postal official. Born in 1899, Shute tried for a commission in the flying corps during World War I, but was turned down because he suffered from a stammer. Instead, he served as a private in the Suffolk Regiment stationed on an island in the Thames River and returned to Oxford after the fighting ended. He joined DeHavilland in the early '20s and was heavily involved with the development of the R-100 airship. Shute's first novel was published in 1926 without making much impact and most of his energies during that decade were devoted to establishing his own aircraft plant, Airspeed, Ltd., in Portsmouth. The company prospered while his literary efforts were largely ignored, apart from the 1936 filming of The Lonely Road, based on his 1932 book. Finally, in 1938, he left Airspeed to devote his attentions to writing, leading to the novel Kindling, which he regarded as his first important book.

Shute kept writing during World War II, a period in which he worked with the Admiralty developing anti-submarine rockets and other high-tech aeronautical weapons. Meanwhile, his fiction advanced in both reach and grasp -- The Pied Piper, one of his most enduringly popular books, found an especially wide and appreciative audience with its story of an aging Englishman with no special love for children who is trapped in France amid the collapse of the Allied war effort in the spring of 1940 and ends up rescuing a group of children from the Nazi occupiers. It was filmed in 1942 by 20th Century Fox and became a major hit with Monty Woolley in the starring role. Shute's novel Landfall (1940) was also a wartime bestseller, telling the story of a test pilot who believes that he accidentally sank a British submarine. Starring Michael Denison, it was filmed in 1949 by Associated British and director Ken Annakin. Shute's 1948 work No Highway dealt with an aeronautical engineer who very nearly destroys himself and brings his industry to a standstill when he predicts the in-flight failure of a passenger airliner. That book, which was widely praised for its sustained suspense and ability to present technical engineering information in an easily understood form for the layman, was filmed in England in 1951 by Fox under director Henry Koster with James Stewart starring as the soft-spoken, eccentric scientist. And the author's 1950 novel A Town Like Alice, about the plight of women captives of the Japanese during World War II, was filmed by Rank in 1956 under director Jack Lee. Starring Virginia McKenna, the story was also the subject of a Masterpiece Theatre television adaptation three decades later.

Shute's books had become regular fixtures on the bestseller lists after World War II and, while they were never accepted as great literature, they were considered among the more challenging serious novels of their period. His non-fiction book Slide Rule, did achieve some serious critical respect, but his most well known and most controversial book, bar none, was On the Beach, a chillingly realistic, carefully written doomsday novel. Published in 1957 at a time when the world's public was beginning to get very nervous about the consequences of fallout from nuclear explosions -- and set in Australia (where Shute had relocated to avoid the high postwar British taxes at the end of the 1940s) -- it told of the final months of the last survivors of a nuclear war, all trying in their various ways to cope with the poison seeping into their air from the Northern Hemisphere. The book's popularity helped jump-start the anti-nuclear movement and undid years of efforts on the part of the U.S. government to push the notion that a nuclear war could be survivable with only some inconvenience and careful planning. It also helped coalesce a serious anti-nuclear, anti-American political movement in Australia and New Zealand. Despite its best-seller status, however, no major studio wanted to touch On the Beach as a film project, partly because no one could see how the story -- which dealt, in part, with an American nuclear submarine crew's efforts at survival -- could be brought to the screen without the cooperation of the U.S. Department of Defense. The latter made it clear that it would do nothing to help facilitate the movie's production, and that seemed to be the end of the issue. Producer/director Stanley Kramer, however, persevered and got the cooperation of an entity every bit as essential as the Defense Department -- the government of Australia. The island nation was eager to encourage American and British filmmaking in its territory and there was no political danger to the government in 1959 in lending one of its navy's submarines to stand in for an American atomic sub. Kramer was known for his ambitious, yet tasteful, work as a producer, and the prospect of getting Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire -- all major box-office names at the time, with each capable of "opening" a movie on their own -- for an extended shoot was as enticing as publicity as anything else about the project. The movie -- which, like other adaptations of Shute's work, followed its source closely -- was a hit, generating still more political ferment and keeping the writer at the center of controversy, as well as generating a decade's more sales for the novel.

Shute took a step back from the topicality of On the Beach in 1959, returning to the world of engineering for his last book, Trustee From the Toolroom, which he finished late that year. He died January 12, 1960 in Melbourne after suffering a stroke, less than a month after On the Beach opened and two-and-a-half months before the publication of his last book. In the decades since, The Pied Piper, No Highway, and A Town Like Alice bounced in an out of print, while On the Beach remained continuously available into the mid-'70s. The latter was somewhat displaced in the second half of the '70s as the anti-nuclear movement shifted its focus from banning various weapon systems to the controversy surrounding nuclear power plants. In the decades since, all of Shute's work -- with the possible exception of The Pied Piper -- has become harder to find in book form, while demand has slackened only somewhat, thus keeping Shute (along with Graham Greene, Joyce Cary, and Somerset Maugham) among the most popular of 20th century English novelists. Filmmakers, especially television producers, still occasionally look to his books as sources for their work. He was even still sufficiently well known into the 1970s to turn up as an oblique comical reference in the form of the author "Nevil Shot" in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Wikipedia: Nevil Shute
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Nevil Shute Norway

Born 17 January 1899
London
Died 12 January 1960
Melbourne
Pen name Nevil Shute
Occupation Novelist
Aeronautical engineer
Nationality British born, Australian
Genres Popular fiction

Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 - 12 January 1960) was both a popular novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer. He used Nevil Shute as his pen name, and his full name in his engineering career, in order to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels [1].

Contents

Background

Born in Somerset Road, Ealing, London, he was educated at the Dragon School, Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. Shute's father, Arthur Hamilton Norway, was the head of the post office in Dublin in 1916 and Shute was commended for his role as a stretcher bearer during the Easter Rising. Shute attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich but because of his stammer was unable to take up a commission in the Royal Flying Corps, instead serving in World War I as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment. An aeronautical engineer as well as a pilot, he began his engineering career with de Havilland Aircraft Company but, dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities for advancement, took a position in 1924 with Vickers Ltd., where he was involved with the development of airships. Shute worked as Chief Calculator (stress engineer) on the R100 Airship project for the subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company. In 1929, he was promoted to Deputy Chief Engineer of the R100 project under Sir Barnes Wallis.

The R100 was a prototype for passenger-carrying airships that would serve the needs of Britain's empire. The government-funded but privately-developed R100 was a modest success but the fatal 1930 crash of its government-developed counterpart R101 ended Britain's interest in airships. The R100 was grounded and scrapped. Shute gives a detailed account of the episode in his 1954 autobiographical work, Slide Rule. He left Vickers shortly afterwards and in 1931 founded the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd.

Despite setbacks and tribulations, and the standard problem of the start-up business, liquidity, Airspeed Limited eventually gained significant recognition when its Envoy aircraft was chosen for the King's Flight.

Shute identified how engineering, science and design could improve human life and more than once used the apparently anonymous epigram, "An engineer is a man who can make something for five bob that any bloody fool can make for a quid!" (historically, a quid was one pound sterling and five bob was one quarter of a pound) as a foreword to his books.

Shute was a cousin of the Irish-American actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. On November 23, 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton, a 28-year-old medical practitioner. They had two daughters, Heather and Shirley.

By the outbreak of World War II, Shute was already a rising novelist. Even as war seemed imminent he was working on military projects with his former Vickers boss Sir Dennistoun Burney. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a sub-lieutenant and quickly ended up in what would become the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. There he was a department head, working on secret weapons such as Panjandrum, a job that appealed to the engineer in him. His celebrity as a writer caused the Ministry of Information to send him to the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 and later to Burma as a correspondent. He finished the war with the rank of Lieutenant-Commander, R.N.V.R.

In 1948, after World War II, he flew his own Percival Proctor light airplane to Australia. On his return home, concerned about the general decline in his home country, he decided that he and his family would emigrate and so, in 1950, he settled with his wife and two daughters, on farmland at Langwarrin, south-east of Melbourne.[2]

In the 50s and 60s he was one of the world's best-selling popular novelists, although his popularity has declined.[3] However, he retains a core of dedicated readers who share information through various web pages such as The Nevil Shute Foundation.[4] .

He had a brief career as a racing driver in Australia between 1956 and 1958, driving a white XK140 Jaguar. Some of this experience found its way into his book On the Beach. Many of his books were filmed, including Lonely Road, Pied Piper, On the Beach (in 1959 and also in 2000), No Highway (in 1951) and A Town Like Alice (in 1956). The latter was adapted as a miniseries for Australian television in 1981.

Shute lived a comfortable middle class English life, during a period, from the turn of the nineteenth century to past the middle of the twentieth, when class was a predominant factor in life. His heroes tended to be middle class: solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers. Usually, like himself, they had enjoyed the privilege of university, not then the purview of the lower classes. However (as in Trustee from the Toolroom), Shute valued the honest artisan, his social integrity and contributions to society, more than the contributions of the upper classes.

Shute died in Melbourne in 1960.

Themes

Aviation is a theme in many of Shute's novels, which are written in a simple, highly readable style, with clearly delineated plot lines. Where there is a romantic element, sex is referred to only obliquely. Many of the stories are introduced by a narrator who is not a character in the story. The most common theme in Shute's novels is the dignity of work, spanning all classes, whether an Eastern European bar "hostess" (Ruined City) or brilliant boffin (No Highway). Another recurrent theme is the bridging of social barriers such as class (Lonely Road), race (The Chequer Board) or religion (Round the Bend). The Australian novels are individual hymns to that country, with subtle disparagement of the mores of the USA (Beyond the Black Stump) and overt antipathy towards the post WW2 socialist government of Shute's native UK (The Far Country and In the Wet).

Belief in private enterprise

 This article may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (November 2009)

Shute's novels frequently present private enterprise (along with self-reliance and individual responsibility) as a source of moral good. In this respect, he advocates a theme found in some examples of American 1950s literature, such as that of Ayn Rand or Cameron Hawley.

The roots of this belief can be clearly traced back to his involvement as a young engineer in the drama of the two competing airships R100 (private) and R101 (state), as recounted in his memoirs 'Slide Rule'. To him, the catastrophic failure of the R101 deeply symbolised the unsoundness of socialist teaching and planning.[citation needed]

A Town Like Alice is a characteristic example. Jean Paget, who has been working as a secretary in a pleasant but uninspiring job, has received a substantial legacy from her uncle. She ponders what she should do, now that she no longer needs to work. The following exchange, as described by her solicitor, Noel Strachan, flashes by almost as an aside, but is key to Jean's character and the story:

I knew of several charitable appeals who would have found a first-class shorthand-typist, unpaid, a perfect godsend and I told her so. She was inclined to be critical about those; "Surely, if a thing is really worth while, it'll pay," she said. She evidently had quite a strong business instinct latent in her. "It wouldn't need to have an unpaid secretary."
"Charitable organizations like to keep the overheads down," I remarked.
"I shouldn't have thought organizations that haven't got enough margin to pay a secretary can possibly do very much good," she said. "If I'm going to work at anything, I want it to be something really worthwhile."

This philosophy also permeates Ruined City (1938; U.S. title: Kindling), which concerns a wealthy and respected banker who lifts a town out of the depression by bringing a shipbuilding concern back to life through money, bribery and questionable financial dealings. His reputation is destroyed and he goes to jail for fraud, but the shipyard is back in business and the town is saved. When he has served his sentence, he returns to the town and finds a bronze plaque on the shipyard gate with his head and shoulders embossed on it and the words:

HENRY WARREN
1934
HE GAVE US WORK

Shute's ethos in Ruined City was inevitably distilled from his own experiences (captured in his part-autobiography, Slide Rule), in trying to set-up and raise capital for a British aircraft manufacturing concern in the depression years of the 1930s.

Indeed, the mythical Lord Cheriton, in Ruined City, was a parody of the real aristocratic equity investor and philanthropic backer of Shute's company, Airspeed Limited.

However, in Ruined City, he also captures some unsavoury aspects of British economic and social history, such as the way that many of the aristocrats and the wealthy exploited their advantages and opportunities in WWI. As soon as peace broke out, they immediately closed their plants, mines, shipyards and factories and took their capital abroad to a wonderful life of sun and relaxed hedonism in places such as Biarritz, Monaco and the Caribbean, throwing hundreds of thousands out of work and destroying their way of life.

Despite a government and capital turning against engineering and manufacturing - which necessitated an instant turnaround for WWII - and an early public fascination with "Flying Machines", waning after WWI was gradually forgotten, Shute and of course others, was aware of the future importance of aviation.

His belief that how British Socialism, after WWII, would tend to destroy what he conceived as the British way of life, and his own views on this, were espoused in works such as In the Wet and The Far Country.

However, Shute lived for and loved engineering, and had great respect for those who worked in this field. The last page of Trustee From The Toolroom expresses this exactly. He valued the honest artisan, his social integrity and contributions to society, more than the contributions of the upper classes.

The Novels - mini summaries

Shute's works can be divided into three sequential thematic categories: Prewar; War; and Australia.

Prewar

The Prewar category includes:

  • Stephen Morris (1923, published 1961): a young pilot takes on a daring and dangerous mission.
  • Pilotage (1924, published 1961): a continuation of "Stephen Morris."
  • Marazan (1926); a convict rescues a downed pilot who helps him break up a drug ring.
  • So Disdained (1928), written soon after the General Strike of 1926, reflected the debate in British Society about socialism. Considered whether Italian fascism was an effective antidote.
  • Lonely Road (1932): Conspiracies and counterconspiracies, along with an experimental writing style.
  • Ruined City (1938; U.S. title: Kindling) a banker revives a shipbuilding company through questionable financial dealings. He goes to jail for fraud, but the shipyard revives. Ruined City was distilled from Shute's experiences in trying to set up his own aircraft company.
  • An Old Captivity (1940): the story of a pilot hired to take aerial photographs of a site in Greenland, who suffers a drug-induced flashback to Viking times.

War

The War novels include:

  • Pied Piper (1942). An old man rescues seven children (one of them the niece of a Gestapo officer) from France during the Nazi invasion.
  • Pastoral (1944): Crew relations and love at an airbase in rural surroundings in wartime England.
  • Most Secret (1945): Unconventional attacks on German forces using a French fishing boat.
  • The Chequer Board (1947): A dying man looks up three wartime comrades. The novel contains an interesting discussion of racism in the American Army: British townsfolk prefer the company of black soldiers.

Australia

The Australia novels include:

  • A Town Like Alice (1950; U.S. title: The Legacy): the hero and heroine meet while both are prisoners of the Japanese. After the war they seek each other out and reunite in a small Australian town that would have no future if not for her plans to turn it into "a town like Alice."
  • Round the Bend (1951), about a new religion developing around an aircraft mechanic. Shute considered this his best novel. It tackles racism, condemning the White Australia policy.
  • The Far Country (1952): A young woman travels to Australia. A mild condemnation of British socialism.
  • In the Wet (1953); an Anglican priest tells the story of an Australian aviator. This embraces a drug-induced flash forward to the UK in the 1980s. Compare with the drug-induced flashback in An Old Captivity. The novel criticizes British socialism.
  • Requiem for a Wren (1955): The story of a young British woman who, plagued with guilt after shooting down a plane carrying Polish refugees in WW2, moves to Australia to work anonymously for the parents of her (now deceased) Australian lover, whilst the lover's brother searches for her in the UK. This aspect is similar to A Town Like Alice, in which the Australian hero travels to the UK to search for the English heroine, who has travelled to Australia to search for him.
  • Beyond the Black Stump (1956): The ethical standards of an unconventional family living in a remote part of Australia are compared with those of a conventional family living in Washington State.
  • On the Beach (1957), Shute's best-known novel, is set in Melbourne, whose population is awaiting death from the effects of an atomic war. It was serialized in more than 40 newspapers, and adapted into a 1959 film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. On the Beach was the first American-made film publicly shown in the Soviet Union[citation needed], and may have influenced American public opinion towards support of the atmospheric test ban treaty. In 2007, Gideon Haigh wrote an article in The Monthly arguing that On the Beach is Australia's most important novel: "Most novels of apocalypse posit at least a group of survivors and the semblance of hope. On The Beach allows nothing of the kind."[5]
  • Trustee from the Toolroom (1960) about the recovery of a lost legacy of diamonds from a wrecked sailboat. Set in Britain, the Pacific Islands and the U.S. northwest.
  • The Rainbow and the Rose (1958): One man's three love stories; narration shifts from the narrator to the main character and back.

Shute also published his autobiography Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer in 1954.

Works

Notes

  1. ^ Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer (1954) ISBN 1-84232-291-5 pages 44-45.
  2. ^ Croft (2002)
  3. ^ "Remaindered with little honour in his adopted land"
  4. ^ nevilshute.org
  5. ^ Haigh (2007)

References

External links

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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