An Objectivist View of Nevil Shute

Book Review

The following is posted with the permission of the author, Arline Mann, and the publishers of the Objectivist Forum, in which it was published in February 1985. It was brought to our attention by Michael and Judith Berliner, California Shutists, and transcribed for the site by Zia Telfair, who hastens to point out that the views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect her own.

Regards from TLOE,

Dan

THE NOVELS OF NEVIL SHUTE
by Arline Mann

(From the Objectivist Forum, February 1985. Arline Mann was an attorney in New York City.)

Lovers of fiction search for books in which they can luxuriate, with the sense of being at home in a world that's "right". Nevil Shute wrote two dozen novels between 1940 and 1957. Many of them offer a chance for readers to live for a a while in a world in which strength of character is common, a world in which goodness is the norm.

"Nevil Shute" was the pen name of Nevil Shute Norway. An engineer and businessman, Shute developed secret weapons for the British during World War II and later became the owner of his own aircraft company. His own life was filled with adventure. The plots and settings of many of his novels reflect his love of adventure, his interest in aviation and technology, and his attraction to Australia, where he spent many years of his life. His novels were quite popular in the 1950's; several, like On The Beach (not one of Shute's better novels) were made into movies. There has been a resurgence of interest in his work since PBS's splendid television production of his novel A Town Like Alice.

The plots of Nevil Shute's novels are simple but original. A Town Like Alice is one of Shute's best. The novel tells of a group of women and children who are force-marched across Malaysia by the Japanese during World War II. One of the group, a young British woman, saves her life and the lives of others by her ingenuity and level-headedness. Unable after the war to resume her prosaic life in England, she goes on to lead a romantic, pioneering life in Australia. In Pied Piper, an elderly British gentleman finds that he is the only hope of two, then three, and finally a large group of children stranded in wartime Europe.

These are characteristic Nevil Shute novels: stories about seemingly unexceptional, almost dull, people who find themselves in exceptional circumstances and who, by choosing to take exceptionally brave and principled action, reveal that they are not dull at all. The main character in Trustee from the Toolroom, perhaps Shute's finest novel, is a shy, retiring man whose only passion is model engineering. Yet he risks his life's savings-and his life--to recover his niece's inheritance, because he views the job as his responsibility as trustee.

Nevil Shute projects a world in which people are free to act and in which the right action can make a difference. It is a world in which rational thought works. The stories are skillfully uncomplicated; the style easy and straightforward. All this is unusual for a modern novelist.

Shute's moral and political premises are also surprisingly un-modern. Entrepreneurship is celebrated and socialism condemned in A Town Like Alice and Far Country, respectively. He never, in the twenty-odd novels I have read, presents altruism as a virtue.

But what is truly distinctive in the novels of Nevil Shute is what the stories and the style are there to showcase: Nevil Shute's view of character. The theme of most of the novels is: "How noble human beings can be."

Nevil Shute's characters are valuers, and what they value is admirable. Courage, honesty, independence, productiveness, love of freedom, loyalty, responsibility, perseverance, resourcefulness--Shute's lovingly drawn characters have these values and act on them. The first section of Trustee from the Toolroom shows the leading character in the process of deciding whether he has a moral obligation to search for his niece's inheritance. The character is not motivated by duty or guilt. He reaches his decision rationally, after intense, dogged concentration, and consequently pursues his mission with great serenity.

The strong values of Shute's characters are also reflected in their romantic lives. The romances about which Shute writes are varied--there is the lively, sometimes combative relationship between the independent lovers in A Town Like Alice, and the muted, plaintive love story which forms the touching subplot of Pied Piper--but in these and in all of Shute's romances, the lovers love because of their shared values and respect.

Add one more element and you have the essence of Nevil Shute: the characters possessing these qualities are presented as regular people, not extraordinary people. We see the hero of Trustee from the Toolroom first as a mild, almost docile man of narrow interests. The British gentleman in Pied Piper seems at first to be like any British gentleman. This is not to say that Shute does not regard them as heroes--he does--but Shute communicates the sense that there are many, many such people in the world, in fact that most people are this fine.

This element is stressed by a related, singular characteristic of Shute's novels' the absence of villains. There are faceless evil groups--the Japanese in A Town Like Alice--but no individual villains come to mind. Shute is not a Pollyanna; he does not believe that all people are good, but in general he focuses on the good and has his heroes fight circumstance, not other people.

The result is the projection of benevolence and a sense of a profoundly civilized world.

There are negative elements in the novels of Nevil Shute. While to his credit, he takes chances and experiments with style, the experiments sometimes fail. Shute's fantasy novels, for example, can be heavy-handed. And Shute does have a startling, bizarrely mystical streak, which pops up in a good number of his novels. An Old Captivity and Round the Bend are Shute at his worst in this respect. Certain other novels, such as No Highway, are marred, though not destroyed, by this element.

But what one misses most in reading Nevil Shute is grandeur in the characters, the plots, and the themes. There is no grandeur partly because Nevil Shute and his characters are British to the core. They are repressed; there may be passion, but it is bound tightly inside. And the themes are not philosophical; they are not grand. In Ordeal, a man manages to get his family out of wartime England to America and then returns to England to fight for his country. The theme concerns the hierarchy of values, but this theme is only implicit and is handled in a personal, non-abstract manner.

Ayn Rand's "What is Romanticism?" (The Romantic Manifesto) provides a deeper answer to the question of why Shute's novels lack fire and grandeur. In that article Miss Rand says,

"Romanticism is a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition."

She explains later that the "distinguishing characteristic" of the finest literature is"

"full commitment to the premise of volition in both of its fundamental areas: in regard to man's character and to his actions in the physical world."

Nevil Shute seems committed to the premise of volition in both areas. His characters act, and act effectively, on the basis of moral values. But in the area of consciousness, volition is generally not dramatized; rather it is assumed, taken for granted. These novels are not about what makes the characters good or why the characters are good; the goodness just is.

Moreover, since there are no villains and few internal moral conflicts, there are no intense clashes of moral values. We want very much to see if the character will succeed in some particular situation, but the moral value itself is not at stake. Nevil Shute's novels are not about the nature of the good-but they are about instances of goodness.

Nevil Shute is a true find. His novels offer absorbing stories about admirable people, written in a clear, solid style. And there is that remarkable benevolence. You will not stand up and cheer, but you will feel proud and warm that men can be deeply, deeply decent. That is a rare pleasure.