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NEVIL’S ADVOCATE
Gideon Haigh in the Telegraph:
They don’t make novelists like Nevil Shute any more: a self-made millionaire who served in both world wars, allergic to literary society, disdainful of critics and against state support for the arts.
It’s 50 years since Shute’s On The Beach was published; quite a book, and quite a writer.
sgtmom—same thing with actors. The ones who’ve done something, anything, outside acting are usually the ones who have the most substantial screen presence…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 06 01 at 09:44 AM • permalink#2: I’m with you, Peter. I also greatly enjoyed Pied Piper, whose hero, incidentally, is named John Howard.
#1: I’m afraid that someone who stays in the academic/literary world usually seems to wind up writing something that appeals only to the other denizens of the academic/literary world,
Couldn’t agree more, Sgt. Mom. I used to work with someone who was, in her spare time, a short-story writer, and she used to lend me books which were, for the most part, anthologies of newly-minted writers. The stories, although generally well-written, involved characters who were primarily professors and writers. Sorry, but unless you’re Tolstoy or Balzac, your fictionalized personal experiences in pursuing your career or craft are not inherently interesting; they can be made so, of course, if you’re an unusually imaginative and creative writer, but so many are merely basic craftsmen: they can make a very nice salad bowl from the clay of their experience, but a Ming Dynasty vase is quite beyond them.
Agreed paco - generally. Sometimes though, an author can relate personal experiences in a way that transports the reader to another place and another time.
I was looking just now for an image of the final scene of the movie. The deserted windswept Melbourne street with the banner slipped from its ties and twisted on itself to read Its Not Too Late ...
I can’t remember whether the novel used the same little trick. But it is the only example I can think of where a movie almost abandons its plot in the last seconds to make a direct appeal to the audience.
I’m still looking. In the meantime here’s a Drybones cartoon.
#1 I’m afraid that someone who stays in the academic/literary world usually seems to wind up writing something that appeals only to the other denizens of the academic/literary world,
Not only that, but they actively discourage anyone from trying to write something outside that box. Genres like mysteries and science fiction are thoroughly despised, despite the fact that some of the best writing in the world today is being done in just those two fields.
#7: Quite right, Peter. My comments weren’t directed at all new writers, by any means, only the crop that I remember reading (admittedly, some time ago).
Just being nosy, but I’d be interested in knowing what commenters here prefer: novels or short stories? I prefer novels, myself, but there are a great many writers whose short stories I enjoy: Greene, Maugham, O. Henry, Conan Doyle, Wodehouse (of course!), etc.
#10 paco:
Short stories.
Poe, Ted Sturgeon (Slow Sculpture in particular), and JL Borges are all great, in addition to what they teach in the schools (O’Conner, Faulkner, Hemingway, Checkov). I could go on for a while, but Sturgeon and Borges are the two that I try to foist on literate folk who may not have encountered those two previously.My favorite Shute book is his autobiography, Sliderule. Most of it details his years as an aeronautical engineer between the wars, and later as a businessman in the aircraft business. His memories of Supermarine, which built the airplane that saved Britain, is well worth reading.
The most fascinating chapter, though, is when he describes his experience as “chief computer” on the project to built the R-101 airship. Ramsey Macdonald’s government had the idea of building zeppelins - which were the most advanced aircraft of their day - but couldn’t stomach the idea of having private companies build them. So they sponsored a competition - one airship would be built by the Air Ministry itself, the other by a private firm. Shute worked on the “capitalist” airship, the R-101.
To make a long, sad story very short, the Air Ministry’s airship, the R-100, was a fiasco. It crashed and burned in France, killing the air minister, Lord Thompson, and most of the crew. Shute description of socialism in action is absolutely devastating.
Being a computer programmer myself, I found Shute’s description of how he computed the stresses acting on the zeppelin’s airframe to be most interesting. Just one series of calculations would take a team of two engineers a month to execute by hand, with each engineer double-checking the other’s work each step of the way. Just astonishing.
Anyway, Sliderule is long out of print, but if you can find a copy, it’s well worth reading.
Posted by Urbs in Horto on 2007 06 01 at 11:07 AM • permalinkThere Is Still Time ... Brother
‘Waltzing Mat plays throughout the film. The Pentagon refused to lend the use of an atomic submarine. Nevil Shute boycotted the entire venture. At the end of the film is seen an abandoned banner, reading ‘There is still time… Brother’. The New York Daily News (December 18, 1959) condemned the film: “This is a would-be shocker which plays right up the alley of a) the Kremlin and b) the Western defeatists and/or traitors who yelp for the scrapping of the H-bomb…. See this picture if you must (it seems bound to be much talked about), but keep in mind that the thinking it represents points the way toward eventual Communist enslavement of the entire human race.”
Boy.
I thought that was a song by the Beach Boys.
On the beach where ...
Actually that’s all I know. I usually sing la la la until I get to “the girls on the beach are all ...”. Um, then I think it’s “within reach”. Daaaa da da da, daaaa da da da. Rhonda works in there somewhere. And a T Bird.
Posted by wronwright on 2007 06 01 at 11:50 AM • permalinkShort stories are well and good, especially in the hands of a master like Flannery O’Connor or Frank O’Connor (no relation, and very different writers). But a good novel is a world in itself. How often I’ve wished I could walk the streets of Middlemarch, or have dinner with the Bennet family, or sit in the gunroom of the HMS Surprise, or toss breadrolls in the Drones Club, or have a drink with the editor of the Daily Beast, or converse with the Elders of the Ekumen, or roam the plains and plateaus of the World of Tiers!
The novelist creates a world into which we escape for a time, and from which we may return refreshed, enlightened, better prepared to cope with the world as it really is. God bless ‘em.
Posted by Urbs in Horto on 2007 06 01 at 01:00 PM • permalinkThere’s a brief discussion of Nevil Shute Norway (his full name) and the competition between the Capitalist airship and Socialist airship teams that alternates between hilarious and horrific in James Gilbert’s “World’s Worst Aircraft”.
For example, the Socialist ship (R-101) was fitted with Beardmore diesel engines (because they thought gasoline to dangerous to use on a hydrogen-filled airship) that were originally designed for railway locomotives.
The end result being that the R-101’s power installation weighed in at 17 tons, compared to the R-100’s 9 tons.
Couldn’t have helped the usable payload.
On top of that, they designed a complex automatic lift gas valve, which were mounted on the sides of the gas bags and almost impossible get at for maintainance. That, and they automatically opened if tilted more than 3 degrees, which was a good deal less than the normal rolling in flight. This meant that the ship lost lift as it flew, instead of getting lighter as it burned off fuel.
Committees.
#20. I am what I read? So that’s waht’s wrong with me. All those bloody mills and boon when an idiot teenager.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2007 06 01 at 02:27 PM • permalinkI was weaned on American Southern writers who wielded the English language like a musical instrument. High school and college fed me the greats (and the not-so-greats). Since then I’ve sampled everything from the trashiest escapism to the most transcendent prose I’ve ever read. Of all the gifts of civilization, reading is one of the greatest, and if I ever lose it, that’s the end of this old girl.
I’m an avid fan of the Paco detective series of short-short stories (notice that he’s so famous, he only needs one name!) I also like the prehistoric caveman series by Jules Crittenden (though he hasn’t written much lately).
The most worthless waste of paper out there today is that relatively new pseudo-science fiction genre.
Paco,
Have you tried abebooks.com? Advanced Book Exchange is a worldwide network of used book dealers. I have found several out of print books through this site. abe booksPosted by Michael Lonie on 2007 06 01 at 06:38 PM • permalinkPity On The Beach was based on such a scientifically flimsy premise: that the radioactive nasties from a nuclear blast stay in the atmosphere almost indefinitely, and that they have a long half-life. They made me read that piece of crap in Year 10. Even then I noticed that the seaman who had to be abandoned by his fellow submariners, because he would most certainly have been irradiated, was catching perfectly healthy (and alive!) fish.
Posted by AlburyShifton on 2007 06 01 at 07:01 PM • permalinkI’m too busy reading comments at Tim Blair to bother with books, and I learn more, too. The Larvae Porno thread is one I’ll have to return to and savor when I have more time.
Posted by dean martin on 2007 06 01 at 07:12 PM • permalinkpaco, I am open in my tastes, reading both novels and short stories, although I tend to focus on science fiction, and (of late) military history and military science fiction.
I read “On The Beach” as well, in high school. An excellent book….I read it well after seeing the movie, which I found very disappointing.
But I never realized that Shute wrote other books….which means my poor budget is about to get rearranged. Again.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 02 at 12:10 AM • permalinkI think Shute’s best book is a lovely short novel about an Australian WWII RAF pilot, from a wealthy farming family and his late brothers fiancee- “Requiem for a WREN” A beautiful read.
I can remember -just-the making of On the Beach, in that once lovely city, now vandalised beyond compare, that was my hometown. Don’t feel the need to go back to it now. Ava is said to have said to a reporter -no journalists then, that Melbourne was a great place to make a movie about the end of the world.
Sob
Cheers
RodCGeorge MacDonald Fraser. Anything he has written, including his memoir of WWII combat, Quartered Safe Out Here (surely the most deprecating title ever for any book about jungle combat against the Japanese).
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2007 06 02 at 09:06 AM • permalink#36 The Flashman Papers -the funniest history books ever written. To build a Victorian warrior from a shady caracter in Tom Brown’s Schooldays is irreverent genius. Fraser must be a very old man by now…...... I am sure all his legions of devotees are, like me, praying that he has the time to reveal Flashy’s adventures in the Civil War, when he served in both the Union and Confederate Armies -probably at different times but one can never be sure. My favourites Flashman at the Charge, Flashman and the Redskins, but really unreasonable to suggest that a series of perfection can have some better than others..
I somehow don’t imagine they appear in the libraries of slime such as phatguts phil and its ilk, nor do I suppose they will be translated into arabic sometime soon..
In bed today with a dreadful cold…. thanks for reminding me of the perfect companion.Cheers
RodC“On the Beach” is a maudlin, hopeless (in the literal sense of the word) dirge on a post-apocalyptic future, based of bad science and lauding an end-of-days hedonism.
Drinking the port celler dry at the Club, auto-suicide at the final Australian Grand Prix, blah, blah, blah…
Remember, this is the book that turned Helen Caldicott into an anti-nuclear, anti-Ameican nutjob. It was the wedge in our high schools which allowed the Left-wing appeasers of the CND and ‘Palm Sunday Peace Rallies’ to recruit thousands of useful fools.
I hated it when I read it, and I hate it now, and I hate its two crappy adaptions for the silver screen.
Posted by Apparatchik on 2007 06 03 at 07:05 PM • permalink
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I have a theory that the most interesting writers-as-storytellers are those who went and did something interesting for a while, had an eccentric life story and lots of friends who also did interesting and non-intellectual things… and who then started writing stories. Nevil Schute definitly qualifies.
I’m afraid that someone who stays in the academic/literary world usually seems to wind up writing something that appeals only to the other denizens of the academic/literary world, and leaves the rest of us bored out of our gourds. A writer like Schute appeals to the rest of us non-lit types. (And I have most of his books. In very aged and tattered paperback editions.)
His appeal has something to do about being able to write with authority about all sorts of odd things; aviation, WWII special ops, business, inventions and sailing ships, among other things.