📚 The Rather Dated Bookclub: Nevil Shute's 'Pied Piper' 📚

I finished Pied Piper this week and loved it! Thanks to whoever suggested it. Easy to read and like others I liked the quiet heroism of Howard and how he just took everything in his stride. Yes, there’s some suspension of disbelief needed (do we really believe that his daughter in America was happy to suddenly have seven random children foisted on her?!) but if you can do that it’s a lovely read.

The only other Shute I’ve read is Trustee from the Toolroom which I also loved, so I’m definitely going to read more. I have A Town Like Alice on my TBR already.

@Terpsichore- I’ve just boughtTravellers (conveniently a Kindle deal). It was the father that particularly annoyed me as he could have taken his children home but he just wanted to stay with the League of Nations, and then the mother just wanted to stay with him. However, that view is with the benefit of hindsight and it is interesting that there were actual examples of this happening.

The next section I found less compelling as I found it difficult to believe that parents would abandon their children to a chance acquaintance - but I suspect that is a very modern reading

Have you read the (excellent) Travellers in the Third Reich, @Benvenuto? It examines contemporary sources from people who - for various reasons - were in Germany and Austria in the early days of Nazism. Many were just on holiday, as with the characters in Pied Piper. There’s one extraordinary story of a British couple who were motoring round various towns on their honeymoon, and a woman - a complete stranger to them - came up and begged them to take her daughter away with them. Iirc the girl was in her early teens and had some sort of disability. The mother read the writing on the wall and knew what Hitler was capable of. The incredible thing was that this couple agreed and took the girl (although they were English they actually lived in Kenya, and she made it to safety there with them).

Yes, I'm fully aware of that, but it didn't need to go into quite so much technical detail about every single model he designed.

I have to say that although I enjoyed the main plot of the Trustee from the Toolroom, I did find all the engineering asides a bit tedious.

But the engineering is an essential part of the story; it's how Keith was able to make connections with so many widely different people, and made it possible for him to get to where he needed to go.

I have to say that although I enjoyed the main plot of the Trustee from the Toolroom, I did find all the engineering asides a bit tedious.

A Town Like Alice is fabulous though. They did a wonderful tv adaptation in the 70s/80s.

My dad was a huge Nevil Shute fan and I’ve inherited that love (and his ancient paperbacks!) No Highway is a particular favourite, as is Ruined City.

I found the first chapter moving (although I guessed what would happen after reading the introduction- I really must remember not to do that and I wish publishers would swap introductions to afterwords). The next section I found less compelling as I found it difficult to believe that parents would abandon their children to a chance acquaintance - but I suspect that is a very modern reading. Then I got caught up in the plot.

I like the frustrations of the journey and the sense that the Germans were encroaching. I also found the description of Nicole quite moving as Howard begins to realise what has happened and why she looks like a widow.

@HelenaWilson- as well as modesty, it’s also striking that Shute both here & in Alice writes about old men and it is very clear to the reader that their health is failing. Both Howard & Noel in Alice are also clearly very competent at their jobs, but they are quite normal jobs for their class (both solicitors).

I think the structure of Alice is probably more sophisticated, but I do like the structure & the framing devices of both. I think the moving forward and backwards in time and the sense that this is a story being told keeps the story fast and pacy. I read Alice just before reading Pied Piper and read both quickly as they hold your attention.

I don’t recall it so I don’t think we did.

I love ‘No Highway’. I grew up around planes so it really meant something to me.

Lettice Coopet’s The New House**

Cooper, obvs 🤦‍♀️

Ooh, I love Nevil Shute. I read my parents' book club editions when I was young but now I have my own.

There are an awful lot of books with ‘house’ in the title, @FuzzyCaoraDhubh! I spent ages being firmly convinced that we were reading Winifred Peck’s Housebound rather than Lettice Coopet’s The New House.

Did we do The House Opposite, Fuzzy? I have no memory of that, but then that’s true of so many things in my life 😂

I love Pied Piper, though, when rereading it recently, I was astonished, like another poster, by the original parents' insouciant handing over of their primary aged children to a total stranger in a war zone.

Shute enjoys a framing device and uses something similar in many of his books. It makes for a cosy feel even when the story is not actually cosy at all.

I very much enjoyed his novel The Chequerboard recently, which is explicitly anti-racist through the stories of several men who were exposed to people of other races and backgrounds through their WW2 experiences.

On the club as framing device: Stephen King revived the idea in 1982 for the novella "The Breathing Method," although the club became as much of a character as the story told there. Although that's hardly modern, at 44 years old, older than Pied Piper was at the time King wrote his story!

I thought we read Doreen as one of our choices? Or maybe someone here recommended it, and I read it from that … anyway, yes really moving. I’m going to order Pastoral and The House Opposite for my “fly and flop” holiday in September. It’s a week so I’ll probably need one more rather dated page turner.
I found Pied Piper excellent. NS is very easy to read, the prose is lucid and unfussy, just how I like it ( although not childlike) and I remember feeling the same about On the Beach and Requiem for a Wren.
What I particularly enjoyed was the contemporaneous nature of the story, written as you say @FuzzyCaoraDhubh , when victory was not certain. I didn’t know, for example, that the Germans set up canteens and rest centres in the bits of France they occupied; when one’s knowledge of WW2 is largely gleaned from films I think one misses the quiet everyday details like that. The food details were interesting ; those poor children, existing on bread and chocolate and red wine mixed with water! And the unsentimental depiction of the children was also very enjoyable.
I don’t think a modern writer of fiction would be allowed by editors to use the framing device that NS uses. But I really liked the quiet heroism of the two men sitting in their club, mildly irritated by the air raid going on above them. It reminded me of a scene I’ve always liked in a black and white war film (can’t recall which) where some sailors are below decks while the luftwaffe strafes them and someone mutters “anyone got any Flit (fly spray)?”
What happened to the kitten? I must have missed that bit.

Doreen is a Persephone book so fairly easy to track down, @JennyChawleigh.
We had Saplings as one of our previous Rather Dated choices!

I'll definitely try and get a copy of Doreen. On the same theme, Saplings , by Noel Streatfeild shows the cumulative psychological.effects of WWII on four siblings.

Sorry, that was obviously a reply to @Terpsichore

I read Doreen a year or two ago and loved it. As you say, it’s sensitively written and so insightful on class, human emotions, and children’s perspectives. And of course the impact of war on civilians.