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

[cornflakegirl]

I've just finished reading On The Beach, and I found it really odd.

I know the world was a different place in the 50s, but did Mary have to be quite so stupid? Why did neither of them cuddle Jennifer at the end? What was with all the working class people (shop assistants, tram drivers, club stewards) stoically carrying on working until they were physically too ill to do so? Why was Peter so keen to preserve naval discipline that he would pointlessly scuttle a submarine and refuse to take civilians on board to do so, meaning that his crew couldn't spend their last minutes with the people they love? Did Shute have any humanity at all? Or any imagination?

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.