Do you remember On The Beach -- that wrenching, understated story, told through the eyes of the last survivors of nuclear war, waiting to die in Australia? The author was Nevil Shute Norway, born in England in 1899. He wrote under the name Nevil Shute. After serving in WW-I, he studied aeronautical engineering at Oxford. Then he worked in airplane and dirigible companies. But he also published his first four novels.
He wrote nothing more until 1938. In the meantime, he formed an airplane manufacturing company called Airspeed, Ltd. By the time he left the company in 1939, he'd built it up to a thousand employees. But he needed to go back to writing. And, from then on, he wrote roughly one book a year until he died in Australia in 1960.
Shute's books are low-key, but his plots are assembled like Swiss watches -- every piece fits perfectly. You simply can't put one down after you're fifty pages into it. They also contain astounding technical realism -- far more than you'd think would hold a readers' attention, much less keep us spellbound. His typical hero (or anti-hero) is reserved, capable, and a little mousy.
Some of his work flirted with strange notions of mysticism -- a lot like early Steinbeck. But he always came back to powerful storytelling. The Legacy was Shute in top form. It was made into a wonderful 1981 TV miniseries -- A Town Like Alice.
By the way, On The Beach was not at all typical. Shute was no writer of Greek tragedy. The engineer in him said that we can solve our problems. We don't let them beat us. Despite his 23 books, largely best-sellers -- many adapted for movies and TV -- Shute was first and last an engineer.
His last book, Trustee from the Toolroom, told of a middle-aged engineer who, to fulfill an obligation, had to do an immensly complicated bit of smuggling. The book was a runaway best-seller in 1961, yet it could’ve doubled as an engineering text. If you've never read any Shute, try him. You'll be surprised.
Take his prophetic novel No Highway. When our Boeing 707 jetliner went into service in 1958, the British long since had the jump on us with their de Havilland Comet. They'd put it into service six years earlier. However, disaster struck a year later.
A Comet leaving Calcutta came apart in a thunderstorm. When investigators could find no other cause, they blamed the storm. Eight months later, a second Comet blew up in a clear sky, 27,000 feet over the island of Elba, off Italy's coast. The wreckage was too deep to recover much from the ocean, so it too went undiagnosed. Three months later, a third Comet exploded over the Mediterranean.
At that point, the whole fleet was grounded. When wreckage was finally brought up, it showed the failure had occurred in the cabin area. So engineers did a huge fatigue test of an actual airplane. They varied the cabin pressure hydraulically while they flexed the wings. After three thousand pulsations, a crack appeared near a cabin window and quickly spread.
The Comet's designers had overlooked stress concentrations at rivet holes near the windows. The problem was fixed, and a new Comet went into service only five months ahead of the Boeing 707.
But Shute, who’d once worked for de Havilland, wrote the best-selling book No Highway four years before the Comets began to fail. It’s about a new airplane called the Reindeer, mysteriously crashed in Canada. Our ears prick up -- Dasher, Prancer, and so forth -- Comet was also one of the Reindeer. A structural engineer named Theodore Honey is sent to investigate the crash. Honey has his own theory that Reindeers should suffer a fatigue failure after about 1400 hours in the air. No one takes him seriously.
Halfway across the Atlantic, Honey, who's pretty oblivious to his surroundings, finds he's in a Reindeer. When Honey learns that this particular plane has been in service just about 1400 hours, he suddenly has to assume responsibility for saving two hundred people -- people who feel no need of being saved. Read the book, or find a video of the movie version, No Highway in the Sky, to see what Honey did. (The movie stars Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich.)
So, we wonder, how on earth Nevil Shute anticipated the Comet disaster. Most likely, his solid engineering instincts simply led him where real life eventually took the Comet. We see something of this same prescience in an earlier Shute book as well. It’s the one he finished just as he left his airplane company.
That book, Ordeal, came out just before the war. It begins one night when a family in Southampton, England, is driven to cover by a completely unexpected air raid. This is Shute’s vision of how WW-II begins. He doesn't name the enemy since Chamberlain had just signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Still, he left little doubt as to who he believed would soon be bombing Great Britain.
The attacking planes avoid defensive fire by dropping into cloud cover as they near a city. Hidden by clouds, unseen and unseeing, they randomly drop bombs on homes and industry, destroying morale and infrastructure. Civilians flee as electricity, food, and water supply systems break down -- as cholera runs rampant.
The family flees to France in their small sailboat. There wife and kids will catch a ship to Canada and husband will turn back to join the Navy. Shute saw a long war of aerial assault and human misery coming and the Battle of Britain, with its terrible bombings, began before his ink was dry.
England proved better able to serve its civilian population than Shute had expected, and civilian morale was stronger. But that may've been because of Shute's warning. Later we all cringed when we read On the Beach (or saw the movie). The nuclear war we feared has not yet come to pass, but that may also owe something to Shute.
Throughout all Shute's war books runs the anonymity of warring armies. They come and go, but noncombatants are constant. Civilians are what war is really about. Shute didn't just predict aerial war directed at civilians. He also predicted the detachment that we’d need to wage such a war.
Just as Shute was England’s fine voice for early flight, we in America had another such voice. His was less inclined to seek out futures, and more inclined to remember the airplane’s past. Next we want to meet the great memoirist and novelist Ernest Gann.
Sources
The Shute books mentioned here have been reprinted many publishers and even under various titles. I recommend you check your library's on-line catalog for his works. Youill be in for some fun.
For more on the Comet failures, see H. Petroski, To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985): Chapter 14.