Tag: Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute No Highway read by Robin Bailey

Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find
No highway more, no track, all being blind
The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.
Though you have conquered Earth and charted Sea
And planned the courses of all Stars that be, Adventure on,
more wonders are in Thee.
Adventure on, for from the littlest clue
Has come whatever worth man ever knew;
The next to lighten all men may be you….

— John Masefield

Shute must be removed from the dusty category of oddish optimistic English writers and reclassified among the chroniclers of all things mechanical, experimental, technical and the men who invent them, perfect them, and test them. Again and again Nevil Shute describes ugly, unpopular, classless, technical men who nonetheless make wonderful things that work. In a word: engineers. Developers. Hackers. Nerds. Shutists, all. A century of nerds, bricoleurs and tinkerers and hobbyists invented buggy applications, tracked each other’s patents, and played with each other’s toys, long before we came along.

Honey is exemplary. A scientist who devises noisy contraptions tearing themselves to bits in order to study stress. A theorist who hasn’t heard of hot water boilers or mops.
Such an insignificant little man is Honey that it is almost inconceivable that he should be right about big important matters – like when planes are likely to crash. It is likewise inconceivable that such a seriously ugly man in a bad suit can make himself loved by a beautiful actress and a beautiful stewardess in the same book. But he does.

Nevil Shutes America: Beyond the Black Stump

Nevil Shute’s America: Beyond the Black Stump

How do we know what we look like to others? They tell us, that’s how.

When Stan, sober geologist, good son and citizen of Hazel, Oregon, tells Molly that he or maybe his friend got a girl pregnant, and that the twelve year old boy next door may or may not be his son, Molly tells him: “That’s just the sort of thing that might have happened in the Lunatic.” Molly is from Lunacy, West Australia.

Stan disagrees:
“The Lunatic was in a foreign country, where people lived to standards that were wholly alien to the United States, drank to excess in an outlandish manner, swapped wives for pistols, and cohabited with native women. It was the way of foreign countries to behave like that and he could readily believe from his reading that worse things happened in France. But it was not the way of the United States. It was deeply insulting to suggest that things that happened in his home town could be in any way comparable with things that happened in the Northern part of West Australia. . .”

Nevil Shute describes this smiling small town and its smilingly kind citizens and the smiling, prim decency of America in 1950. As always, the description is exact, scientific, benevolent. And, as always, it is a just a little detached, a little uneasy, a little remote. As always, it is the description of a visitor. There are pleasant shaded avenues and white painted homes and Stan’s mother and Stan’s father and Stan’s Aunt watching TV in the evenings. There is good and bad and no alcohol. There is talk.

“Everybody here talks about the frontier. And says this is a frontier town. You’re pretty proud of that. But you’ve forgotten what the frontier’s like… honestly, you have. When your first tough guys broke through the Rockies from the East and found this lovely place they married Indian girls. You know it and you’re rather proud of it. Its part of the frontier legend. Well, the frontier’s moved on. Our country’s the frontier now. But when I told Helen this morning that I got a lot of half cast brothers and sisters she nearly threw a fit.”

How do we know what we look like to others? They tell us, that’s how. They tell us that we are a little civilized, but only a little. We don’t believe them. And so we never know. More…