Today, we meet Nevil Shute Norway. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Do you remember On The
Beach? It was a wrenching, understated story
told through the eyes of the last survivors of
nuclear war, waiting to die in Australia. Thirty
years ago, the best-selling book, and a fine movie
based on it, made a disturbingly realistic case
against the nuclear stalemate.
The author was Nevil Shute Norway, born in England
in 1899. He wrote under the name Nevil Shute. After
serving in WW-I, he trained at Oxford to be an
aeronautical engineer. From 1922 to 1933 he worked
in airplane and dirigible companies. He also
published his first four novels, one of which was
made into a movie.
He published nothing more until 1938. During that
time he formed an airplane manufacturing company
called Airspeed, Ltd. When he left the company to
join WW-II in 1939, he'd built it up to a thousand
employees. He went back to his books in 1938 and
wrote roughly one 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, and you simply can't put one down after
you're 50 pages into it. They also contain
astounding technical realism -- far more than you'd
think could hold his readers' attention, much less
keep them spellbound.
His typical hero (or anti-hero) is reserved,
capable, and a little mousy. When his book No
Highway was made into a movie, Jimmy Stewart
played an introverted engineer crossing the
Atlantic in an airliner. He discovered that this
plane was due to suffer a fatigue failure and then
had to convince the disbelieving crew.
Some of his work -- An Old Captivity
and In The Wet, for example -- 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 also made into a movie,
but you're more likely to remember the wonderful
television miniseries based on it. It was renamed
A Town Like Alice.
By the way, On The Beach wasn't 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. He once said
that he thought of himself as "an engineer who
writes books." Despite his extraordinary success --
23 books, largely best-sellers -- many adapted for
movies and television -- despite all this, he was
first of all an engineer.
His last book, Trustee from the
Toolroom, told of a middle-aged engineer
who, as the result of an obligation, had to do an
immensly complicated bit of smuggling. The book was
a runaway best-seller in 1961, yet it could have
doubled as an engineering text. If you've never
read any Shute, try him. You'll be surprised.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
