Nevil Shute

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Nevil Shute Norway

Born January 17, 1899(1899-01-17)
London
Died January 12, 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, as Nevil Shute, a popular novelist, as well as a successful aeronautical engineer. In the 50s and 60s he was one of the world's best-selling popular novelists, although his popularity has declined.[1] However, he retains a core of dedicated readers who share information through various web pages such as nevilshute.org.

Contents

[edit] Biography

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. R100 was a modest success but the fatal 1930 crash of its government-funded 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. In 1931, he married Frances Mary Heaton. They had two daughters.

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 soon 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.

In 1948, after World War II, he flew his own plane 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]

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, where class was a predominant factor in life. His heroes often tended to be middle class: solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers. Invariably, 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.

[edit] Themes

Aviation is a theme in all 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, a technique used by Conrad.

[edit] The Novels

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

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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): About love and fishing in wartime.
  • 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.

[edit] Australia

The Australia novels include:

  • No Highway (1948): An engineer predicts metal fatigue in a new aircraft. Interestingly, the Comet failed for just this reason soon after publication.
  • 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.
  • 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 a dying Australian aviator. The novel criticizes British socialism.
  • Requiem for a Wren (1955): The story of a young British woman who fell in love with two brothers during the Normandy invasion.
  • On the Beach (1957), Shute's best-known novel, is set in an Australian town awaiting death from the effects of an atomic war. It was serialized in more than 40 newspapers, and adapted into a film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in 1959. 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."[3]
  • 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.

[edit] Works

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "Remaindered with little honour in his adopted land"
  2. ^ Croft (2002)
  3. ^ Haigh (2007)

[edit] References

Persondata
NAME
ALTERNATIVE NAMES English-Australian novelist
SHORT DESCRIPTION
DATE OF BIRTH 17 January 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH London, United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH 12 January 1960
PLACE OF DEATH Melbourne, Victoria, Australia