Nevil Shute - not a big fan of women? Or people in general?

I loved On the Beach but it really is impossible to enjoy it unless you read it as a period piece. I think it was how NS would like people to behave at the end rather than how they actually would. He obviously admired stoic, pragmatic types.

I loved 'On the Beach', but I do like a dose of misery in my reading now and again. Can't remember thinking the author didn't like women but he didn't seem keen on kids, doesn't the dad keep referring to their daughter as 'the child'? (can't remember the names).

I'm not sure it would have had the same effect or had the same message if they'd spent the entire book knitting thick cardies.

I read an abridged version of No Highway at school which managed to remove the seances and references to that sort of stuff. Which leaves some gaps in the plot, to put it mildly.

Yes, then one about the aircraft and stress/metal fatigue? was No Highway. One of his best.

It the Wet was another one I loved but found unsettling. A man's dreams/fantasies about a republican UK in 1983!

ATLA is one of my all time favourite books. We need to remember that Shute was writing at a different time and when the world was very different and in places very racist. It still IS very racist in some areas but has become more subtle. In ATLA the main character opens an Ice cream bar in the outback for the workers, she has a separate bar for "coloured"people. Even as a 13 year old reading that I was shocked but fact is that in the past this is what people did. It's horrific and horrible and separatist but Shute writes about it as it was, using the language the people might have used themselves.

As for women, I don't know his attitude but ATLA is full of strong women who March across Malaysia in the guard of Japanese soldiers who are telling them they are going to a camp. Many women and children die on route but half survive and Jean (the main character) is a very strong woman who survives through good health, spirit and determination. The Malay section of the book is based upon the experiences of a woman Shute knew and who had gone through the experiences he described in the book.

I think I am going to have to reread ATLA because I really can't remember the racism in it. Must have been too long ago to recall.

this thread is funny.

Anyone read Whatever Happened to the Corbetts? by Nevil Shute. I think the premise is that in the early days of WW2, bombing destroys the sanitation/water supply systems and diseases like cholera etc break out. The corbetts are a middle class family (natch) who get on their canal boat to escape. What always struck was through the entire book, while much of their time is taken up with finding clean milk for their infant, said infant is NEVER referred to as anything other than Baby.

My dad loved Nevil Shute so I read a lot of them. ATLA is brilliant (while horribly racist). A lot of his other ones were great on plot (anyone remember the one about the airplane and the effect of stress of time or some such thing?). i reckon he'd be writing for the movies if he was alive today.

Tubas into life rafts? Have you never seen a brass instrument?

I doubt if the musicians on Titanic were deluded about their imminent death, with hundreds screaming and dying around them. They were presumably not talking about what to do next year or whether to take a post on a different ship when all this fuss is over. They chose to spend their last minutes alive doing what they love to do - playing their instruments.

That is not the same thing as spending MONTHS doing nothing to find a solution to approaching death. And the musicians on Titanic didn't have a submarine at hand. If they did, I dare say they would not have left it lying there so they could drown in peace.

I don't know about Polish families who stayed in their homes while Nazis approached, but they may have thought they would be spared - i.e. not the same thing as certain death.

No they aren't yet affected. They are waiting (like particularly stupid sitting ducks) for lethal clouds to come.

Oh I thought that by the time they'd realised the perils of the radiation being carried in the air they'd already been affected? It's been a few years since I read it though!

"I can agree with you that the idea of people collectively in denial is interesting."

Not interesting. Silly.

"But towards the end of the book, they start to recognise practically that the end is coming... The middle classes are allowed to start recognising that the end is coming"

You see, none of that makes any sense to me. I would recognise that the end is coming within seconds of finding out that a toxic cloud that has killed the rest of the world is coming our way. And so would everyone else above the mental age of 6, I imagine.

So are they all dumb? Or is Shute just the worst sci-fi author ever? Neither option makes a great book, IMHO.

"hadn't everyone already been affected by the radiation rendering it pointless for them to seek new lives anywhere else? "

No. The toxic cloud was coming from the North and they were in Australia, so they could have tried going further South. They could use that submarine they have. They could be spending their remaining months knitting very thick clothing to survive life in Antarctica for a couple of months, going there in expeditions to make liveable spaces, see if they can survive until the toxic cloud dissipates.

Anything but sitting around sipping sherry and talking about not fishing outside of hunting season, because that might diminish the number of fish for next year. Next year!?! Don't they realise they will all be dead by then?

Band of imbeciles. I was thinking they should hurry up and die like the useless dummies that they are by the end of it.

(Still getting worked up about the days I spent reading that stupid book )

It's been a while since I read this but hadn't everyone already been affected by the radiation rendering it pointless for them to seek new lives anywhere else?

NS is one of my favourite authors with Requiem For A wren being one of the most re-read books I own. I found On The Beach disturbing to say the least but concur with all of neverevernorever's comments above.

Rainbow and the Rose is another great read as is No Highway. Very much of their time but then that's one of the things I find so interesting about his work.

I loved On the Beach although it does have to be read within the context of its period.

People who had come through a world war, not knowing their fate, were expected to carry on as normal. Alongside the fact that the power of self denial is enormous, makes their behaviour entirely convincing (to me).

wouldn't you clobber him with a stick if that was your husband abandoning you while death approaches?

Although it made for a crap episode of New Tricks a while ago, it's pretty widely believed now that the entire bunker-bound "sub-regional government" model for post-nuclear Britain would have failed. Some years ago I chatted to someone on the periphery of that world, and he said that everyone, including both military and civil service seniors, knew that it was a charade. In reality, the vast majority of people with bunker tickets would have gone to their families rather than abandoning them. And as, paradoxically, the rules for what was in those days positive vetting meant that married men were much more likely to be involved than single men, there would be for practical purposes no-one in the bunker when it came to it.

"Those of you objecting to the behaviour of the charactars as carrying on as 'normal' - what would you envision them doing instead?"

I sincerely recommend that you read a couple of books in the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic genre if you are really asking this. Or watch some movies like Deep Impact, Armageddon, War Of The Worlds, or 2012.

What those people should have done (and would have done, considering normal human drive for survival) is to never stop looking for a way out of their impending doom - use that submarine of theirs to transport everyone further South, dig living spaces & corridors and fashion home-made air-filter systems to live underground for as long as they can, hoping the fallout clears in a year or two. Stock vitamins, medicine, antibiotics, long-lasting food in cars and tins. Fight each other for a space on that submarine as it goes towards Antarctica, where their families can at least live several months longer.

Whatever, really. ANYTHING but sitting around like morons, talking about whether they should wait for hunting season & who will next get married and have babies, knowing full well that they will all be dead in several months.

"I think it's psychologically convincing that people would deal with the end of the world by pretending it wasn't happening"

ALL of them? A man saying he should take a job in another city and leave his wife and baby to die without him because it is good for his career - even if he is delusional, wouldn't you clobber him with a stick if that was your husband abandoning you while death approaches?

A Town Like Alice doesn't verge on casual racism, it is out and out racist. The Aborigines are treated pretty much like dumb animals throughout. That really spoiled the book for me.

I think On the Beach was one of his later novels. I agree I really didn't like it, possibly as it was a school text and that sucks all enjoyment out of a book.
A town like Alice, Requiem, Beyond the Black Stump, In the Wet and The far Country I all enjoyed. They are very much a product of the time they were written and Shute often seems conflicted by his upper middle class Englishness and the associated privilege and his attempts to get into the psyche of the lower classes. He draws a good character. I might read some more!

On The Beach is among the absolute worse sci-fi I have ever read. And I say this as someone who has read been heavily reading sci-fi for three decades.

I have ranted about shared my thoughts on this book before here, here, and here. It is the incredibly silly story of how a group of people would NOT behave when faced with imminent death - not lifting a finger to save their own lives, talking about their careers, who will marry who and have children in the future etc. I pushed through and read it all thinking that there must be a point to it all, but there wasn't.

Oh I'm prepared to believe PPs that his other books are full of insight and good characterisation, etc. Although I can't see how, myself. Maybe 'On the Beach' was an early effort of his, and he improved later? But for myself I don't think I can be bothered to try him again.

I think the OP is going to give his others a go, though.