Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute (London, January 17, 1899 – Melbourne, January 12, 1960) (full name Nevil Shute Norway) was one of the most popular novelists of the mid-20th century. His stories and characters have a genuine sweetness to them, which occasionally becomes cloying, but which helps explain why a half-century after his death, virtually all his books remain in print.

Style and themes

The narrative backbone of a Nevil Shute novel usually involves the planning and execution of a complex and worthwhile mission or quest. Shute's protagonists are often ordinary people who feel a sense of responsibility and an obligation to complete their difficult task. For example:

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• An Old Captivity involves a pilot who is hired by an archaeologist to take aerial photographs of a site in Greenland. Nevil Shute takes us through the practical details: how the trip is budgeted, how the cost of the plane can be offset by the resale value at the end of the trip, how the pilot must plan for lodging and refuelling at remote locations, how he must learn to operate the aerial camera himself.
• The framing story of A Town Like Alice (U.S. title: The Legacy) is about business development. It opens in a solicitor's office, where a young woman who has just inherited money explains that she "wants to go back to Malaya and dig a well" (a quest). By the end of the book, she is operating a small shoe factory in an Australian outback town, then an ice cream parlor where the factory staff can spend their wages, then a cinema, and a few other things... and the economic development she has touched off is putting the previously dingy town of Willstown on track to become "a town like Alice."
• The Trustee from the Toolroom concerns a machinist who makes a small but adequate income writing articles for model-making magazines. His wealthy relatives leave their daughter with him for a sailing trip around the world. Their boat is wrecked on a remote Polynesian atoll and no trace can be found of the legacy they should have left their daughter. He realizes that they must have converted their fortune to valuables and smuggled them out of England to avoid taxes. To discharge his obligation as trustee, he realizes that he must somehow personally travel to the wreckage site and recover the valuables, and do this secretly.