If you're under 50 you may not be familiar with this exceptionally reliable author of "Really Good Reads." Shute's novels can be counted on to combine the page-turning pace of bestsellers and the love-story appeal of a sensibility formed before today's emphasis on the raw-and-gritty -- with the added ingredient of serious ideas you'd expect from "literature" instead of mere popular fiction.
Shute was an English (later Australian) novelist most productive during the 1940's and '50's. If you immediately think only of "On The Beach" -- his bestseller (and hit movie) of post-atomic-war catastrophe -- I urge you to disregard that one atypical work (Shute himself loathed it) and give his many other novels a try.
Shute's work typically combines his three deepest interests: aviation (think Ernest Gann) and spirituality (of a very open-ended, speculative, Asian-oriented flavor -- perhaps Alan Watts) and the depiction of social customs (as Edith Wharton or Henry James might have done more readably if they'd not been quite so desperate to be "profound.")
I'd suggest these three titles especially:
"Round the Bend," a story of a 1920's English working-class kid fascinated by airplanes, who eventually achieves his dream: running a tiny freight-and-charter line in the Persian Gulf area -- and whose closest lifelong friend, a mechanic, might (or might not) have been God incarnated in human form here on earth. The book's middle-eastern setting and peoples and customs make it especially pertinent in light of current events in that part of the world.
"In the Wet," a story told almost entirely in flashback about how a washed-up priest and an opium-smoking Chinaman learn that a part-Aborigine son of a stock-herder becomes pilot in command of Queen Elizabeth's equivalent of "Air Force One" -- in which he saves her life and makes possible an Australian capitalist alternative to Post-WWII British socialism. (Did I tell you this guy combines varied elements?! Yet he's completely, thoroughly, readable.) The book's economic and social commentary on capitalism vs. socialism makes it relevant today, when the U.S. may well be on the brink of it's most serious economic problems since the Great Depression.
Lastly, "Requiem for a Wren" (British title) or "The Breaking Wave" (American title) -- the story of an English girl in their WW-II navy (WRENs in the UK; WAVEs in the US) whose moment of heroic success shooting down a German bomber eventually destroys her life. Shute (himself a pilot with thousands of flight hours, and also an aviation designer) never loses the cool, clear focus of the technically-expert as he recounts the WRENs descent into hell. There is never any slip into maudlin bathos. His novel reads almost like the final, crisp dialog on a Cockpit Voice Recorder, preserving a flight crew's final, increasingly desparate but never panicked conversation as they try right to the last second to regain control and remain alive. From Linda Bray in "Just Cause" in Panama to Jessica Lynch, Lynndie England, etc. in Iraq, to Kara Hultgreen and others elsewhere, women soldiers are now part of the US combat military. Shute's novel from 60 years ago still has thoughtful comments to make on this latest example of today's "current thinking."
The Shute fan club's website has complete plot synopses, jacket covers, author's bio details, and a thousand times more info than you want to know. It's at:
http://www.nevilshute.org/new.php
Shute was an English (later Australian) novelist most productive during the 1940's and '50's. If you immediately think only of "On The Beach" -- his bestseller (and hit movie) of post-atomic-war catastrophe -- I urge you to disregard that one atypical work (Shute himself loathed it) and give his many other novels a try.
Shute's work typically combines his three deepest interests: aviation (think Ernest Gann) and spirituality (of a very open-ended, speculative, Asian-oriented flavor -- perhaps Alan Watts) and the depiction of social customs (as Edith Wharton or Henry James might have done more readably if they'd not been quite so desperate to be "profound.")
I'd suggest these three titles especially:
"Round the Bend," a story of a 1920's English working-class kid fascinated by airplanes, who eventually achieves his dream: running a tiny freight-and-charter line in the Persian Gulf area -- and whose closest lifelong friend, a mechanic, might (or might not) have been God incarnated in human form here on earth. The book's middle-eastern setting and peoples and customs make it especially pertinent in light of current events in that part of the world.
"In the Wet," a story told almost entirely in flashback about how a washed-up priest and an opium-smoking Chinaman learn that a part-Aborigine son of a stock-herder becomes pilot in command of Queen Elizabeth's equivalent of "Air Force One" -- in which he saves her life and makes possible an Australian capitalist alternative to Post-WWII British socialism. (Did I tell you this guy combines varied elements?! Yet he's completely, thoroughly, readable.) The book's economic and social commentary on capitalism vs. socialism makes it relevant today, when the U.S. may well be on the brink of it's most serious economic problems since the Great Depression.
Lastly, "Requiem for a Wren" (British title) or "The Breaking Wave" (American title) -- the story of an English girl in their WW-II navy (WRENs in the UK; WAVEs in the US) whose moment of heroic success shooting down a German bomber eventually destroys her life. Shute (himself a pilot with thousands of flight hours, and also an aviation designer) never loses the cool, clear focus of the technically-expert as he recounts the WRENs descent into hell. There is never any slip into maudlin bathos. His novel reads almost like the final, crisp dialog on a Cockpit Voice Recorder, preserving a flight crew's final, increasingly desparate but never panicked conversation as they try right to the last second to regain control and remain alive. From Linda Bray in "Just Cause" in Panama to Jessica Lynch, Lynndie England, etc. in Iraq, to Kara Hultgreen and others elsewhere, women soldiers are now part of the US combat military. Shute's novel from 60 years ago still has thoughtful comments to make on this latest example of today's "current thinking."
The Shute fan club's website has complete plot synopses, jacket covers, author's bio details, and a thousand times more info than you want to know. It's at:
http://www.nevilshute.org/new.php