|
FROM Joost
Meulenbroek joost.meulenbroek@mac.com Meeting in the Netherlands The next meeting in the Netherlands for Shutists will be held on 14 October next at the Take Off Restaurant at Teuge Airport. We will be discussing No Highway, or Spel met de Dood, as the Dutch translation is named (Play with the Death). A new British airliner is flying into certain disaster, high above the icy Atlantic. One of its passengers is a brilliant scientist convinced he knows the fatal flaws in the airframe. His agonising decision will decide the fate of everyone on board the aircraft……… We will meet from 11:00 am and have lunch around noon. After lunch we will discuss the book. Depending on the attendees, the discussion will be in Dutch or English. The participation to this meeting is free, but for the consumptions that you will have and the lunch. The address is: Restaurant Take Off de Zanden 13 395 PA Teuge www.restauranttakeoff.nl tel: 055-3231542 If you want to come to this meeting, please let us know in advance, via email: joost.meulenbroek@mac.com, or mobile phone: +31 6 54 791 307 FROM Noelle Robson nogsy@aol.com Meeting in the UK The next UK Meeting for Shutists will be held on Sat 3 November in Southampton, to discuss A Town Like Alice. Meet at 10.30 for a tour of the Solent Sky Museum, guided by the manager Steve Alcock who has a good knowledge of Shute and his aviation connections. Will include a cockpit visit to a flying boat. £5 per person. www.solentskymuseum.org/exhibitions Followed by lunch at the Admiral Sir Lucius Curtis, a short walk away in Ocean Village. They will provide an area for us to eat and discuss the book. Parking is available £5 for 5 hours behind the pub. If you wish to attend please let me know before 20 October - nogsy@aol.com or message me on FB via Shutists. HUGE thanks to new Shutist Geoffrey Wheeler for his advice and assistance. FROM Bill Levy bill@billlevyshares.com
Wanted to share this with fellow Shutists:
Recommended reading (or listening): American
historian David McCullough’s 1991 book of essays on
famous personalities, “Brave Companions.” There is
a chapter titled “Long Distance Vision” which
discusses the lives and writings of several
author-aviators including Nevil Shute Norway.
Although the focus is on Charles Lindberg, Beryl
Markham, and Antoine de Saint Exupery, Shute is
mentioned serval times and there is an interesting
discussion of why these pilots wrote.
FROM Joy joy@metrabadge.myzen.co.uk
Oh crikey! I never thought it would come to
this! Is no-one interested in Nevil Shute any
more? I suppose younger people won’t be,
because they have other things to think about
now. And many of the things that Nevil wrote
about have become reality, or have been sorted
out by science as a negative. But I love his
style of writing, and that is one thing that
will not go away!
I am also a fan of John Windham, and his books have gone the same way…except’ Day of the Triffids’ which is always done in a bad way, and not like the book which explains more… From Nick Trefethen trefethen@maths.ox.ac.uk Dear Mr. Kwiatkowski,
I am fascinated with
your posting in the
August 2018 NSN
newsletter and wish you
good luck with your
project to study Shute's
oeuvre-
Like you, I got hooked on Shute at an impressionable age. Years later, I find myself a fellow of Balliol (Shute's college at Oxford) and married to another academic, in English literature. Both of these connections are rather gloomy from a Shute perspective -- and fascinating from a sociological perspective. The fact is, most Balliol fellows aren't much interested in Shute; he barely registers compared with, say, Robert Browning or Graham Greene. And the fact is, most English literature scholars aren't interested in him either, though they write books in their hundreds about, say, Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. There's a terrifyingly strong sense of what is in the canon and what is not, and Shute is nowhere near. There are many things going on here, and I wouldn't pretend that Shute stretched literature in the same ways as Woolf or Joyce. On the other hand, he said far more about the twentieth century, and his near-total invisibility in intellectual circles nowadays is extraordinary. It's clear that fashion has a lot to do with attention,and one day, who knows, Shute studies may come to life. Perhaps you will play a part in that. From Eunice Shanahan ears@gil.com.au
Re the item on Mary Ellis in the
August issue of the Newsletter.
What a co-incidence, we just watched a programme about 100 years of the RAF with brothers Colin and Ewan who are/have been connected with the RAF, and they had a segment on these ladies and showed Mary Ellis, who was still as bright and perky as ever at age 100 when the programme was filmed, sadly the other lady with her Joy Lofthouse died at aged 97 before the programme was broadcast. One of these delivered 1000 planes herself, and they did a marvellous job. It was interesting that they mentioned that these ladies were the first to have equal pay! From J.B. Robert creegah@atoah.com
As I approach the end of my years on earth,
I decided to re-read all of the Nevil Shute
novels slowly and in chronological order.
I'm doing it on a Kindle which makes it very
easy because, as the eyes get weaker, you
can adjust the font size accordingly. It
goes without saying that the more you read
Shute, the more examples of his craft come
to the surface. Let's say that Shute is
talking about a town or city with which you
have absolutely no knowledge because you
have never been there. At the end of a few
pages, things begin to look and sound
familiar and you wonder if you had been
there at one time or another, perhaps just
passing through on your way to some other
destination. By the end of the chapter, you
have lived there all your life and are
totally familiar with the people, their
habits, the food, the government, the
religion, the houses, the vegetation, the
animals and everything else. And you learned
it totally painlessly.
FROM John Anderson j.c.anderson@mail.com An Engineer's Storyteller
Nevil Shute's engineering background
pervades very many of his books. Here is
one example from Most Secret. Charles
Simon gets back to England after his
mission in France to glean information
on the U boat pens at Lorient. Major
Norman asks him to describe what he has
seen and gives him a notebook and
pencil.
Another author might have had Charles doing some sketches and giving a long verbal description, but not Shute - Charles says he cannot do it that way and asks for a drawing board, T square and tracing paper. As he says "In twenty-four hours you shall have proper working drawings of the thing that any engineer can understand" He unburdens his memory putting down on paper all that he saw and memorised. When he has finished he asks anxiously if this work is good enough to get him a commission in the Royal Engineers, and it is. FROM Art Cornell gac29@aol.com Review of Thorn’s Shute Book
I have just finished reading Richard
Thorn’s book Shute, the Prince
of Story Tellers. As a longtime
fan of Nevil Shute having read all of
his books, as the founder of the Nevil
Shute Society with three Chapters, as an
attendee of most of the Nevil Shute
Foundation Gatherings, I still learned a
lot more about Shute.
Richard Thorn has written a detailed biography of Nevil Shute Norway that is excellently, chronologically put together from beginning to end. He writes about his childhood and his education some of which I had not learned before. I did not know that he was engaged to be married when he was in college. And I was surprised to learn that the woman eventually turned him down. Later, when he was working as an engineer, he fell in love with another woman and she also turned him down -- twice. Now wonder his main character in Lonely Road, written shortly after, had also been turned down many times for marriage, like the author. Thorn writes in great detail about his entire life. He emphases Shute’s travels gathering information needed to write his next book. Many of Shute’s books were made into movies and Thorn showed how, most of the time, he complained about the films; that they did not accurately depict his books – especially On the Beach. Thorn also wrote extensively about Shute’s book reviews and how many reviews were not good. And then the readers ignored the reviews buying his books by the hundreds of thousands. One criticism I have is that he did not quote Linus Pauling, the Nobel Laurette, who said with regard to On the Beach that Nevil Shute had saved the world – soon after the book was published the anti-nuclear crusade began. |
A nice newsletter this month. I can say that, as you are writing it, not me,
I'm just copying and pasting, and doing a little bit of editing. Plenty of
copy, please keep that up.
From the Netherlands, where the weather is still lovely, see you all next month.
