Back to the Classics: Requiem for a Wren by Nevil Shute (1955)

It’s been a while since I’ve read anything by Nevil Shute and this book reminded me how much I enjoy his writing. I thought I’d already read the best of his novels but Requiem for a Wren certainly deserves to be placed on a par with works such as Pied Piper, A Town Like Alice, and Trustee From the Toolroom.
Set partly in the time of WW2 and the years following, it is filled with Shute’s trademark aviation knowledge, which surprisingly doesn’t hinder this non-tech reader’s enjoyment of his writing.
I’ve previously mentioned the author’s ability to get into the skin of his characters who are never ‘standard heroes’ but just very ordinary people whose courage is called upon by unlooked for dilemmas and circumstances; common, quiet folk who rise for a short time, do what needs to be done and go back to their quiet lives. This book is no exception.
From the very first page there is a sense that this story is going to be tragic. There is an inexorable pull in that direction as Alan, the narrator, tells the story of his brother, Bill, and Janet, the young woman he would have married had he survived the war.
All three had met just before the invasion of Normandy but were never to meet again.
The brothers were Australian and the story takes place in Britain and Australia.
After the war Alan sets out on a quest to find Janet, a search that takes him back to England, across to America and then back to Victoria in Australia. What he finds out in his search poignantly reveals Janet’s character and background. Alan is determined to find her and to offer her a home with his parents on their rural property which would have been her lot if circumstances hadn’t intervened to prevent her marriage to Bill.
Unfortunately, Alan always found himself on the back foot in his search. Between Janet’s many moves, the post war confusion, his hospitalisation and rehabilitation after being seriously injured in an air battle, he would arrive somewhere expecting to find her only to discover she had moved on.

'Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after its all over.'

This is a sad book with a mix of mystery and WW2 events. Somehow Shute imbues his tragedies with a not altogether bleak outlook. There is some hope within the pathos.
An achingly beautiful read. Highly recommended!

For my thoughts on other books by Nevil Shute see here and here.


Linking up to the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge: Classic Tragic Novel

Trustee From the Toolroom by Nevil Shute...don't judge a book by its title

Nevil Shute was an engineer by background and Trustee From the Toolroom sounded to me like something related to that field - not my cup of tea. But I was wrong and I'm grateful to Eric Schonblom, the author of the Constance Savery Website, who recommended it to me knowing that I'd read and enjoyed some other books by this author.
Well, the main character, Keith Steward, does work in a toolroom, and has a model engineering workshop in his home and writes weekly articles for the "Miniature Mechanic," but the book is really about a very ordinary man who suddenly finds himself endowed with a trust - his ten year old niece -  and in his determination to be faithful to that trust, is plunged into exceptional circumstances.


 ...he wore a greasy old raincoat and an equally greasy old soft hat; he had a shabby muffler round his throat. He was pale with lack of sun and exercise, and running a bit to fat. He looked, as he sat in the trolley bus taking him to Ealing Broadway, like any one of thousands of men to be seen in buses in any industrial district, and he was.


From his ugly house in the west of London which he and his wife were still paying off, with very little money and no knowledge of the world outside of England, he finds his way to the other side of the world in the search of his niece's inheritance. Along the way he encounters people who have relished and benefitted from his engineering articles and discovers that his small acts of kindness and devotion to his work over the years have opened doors in the most unlikely places.


Keith Stewart had never had a shower in the whole of his life. he had seen them in shop windows and had read about them, but one had never come his way.

He would have to have some money in his pocket, and they used dollars here, it seemed. He had never cashed a traveller's cheque before...

Keith sat at the helm, terrified. he had never sailed a ship of any sort before. Now he was in sole control of this rushing, heaving monster which towered above him in a mass of brown sails and rope whose very function was a mystery to him.

Nevil Shute usually manages to insert quite a bit of technical information into his novels, especially about aircraft, and he does so in this book also, but his knack for weaving a compelling story around the technicalities makes them palatable. Even to someone like me who still can't work out how to set our electric alarm clock.



Linking up with Booknificent Thursdays

An Old Captivity by Nevil Shute (1940)

An Old Captivity is the fifth book I've read by Nevil Shute (1899-1960). He is definitely an author I want to keep on reading. An engineer by trade, his great love was aircraft, and details of flying and various types of aircraft are often found in his stories. I'm not very technically inclined but I don't mind the detailed explanations he includes in some of his books.

There is a website devoted to Nevil Shute which includes an address made by his daughter at a Nevil Shute Celebration in 1999 in which she talks about her father and the type of man he was. The main character in An Old Captivity, David Ross, is a similar sort of character to the author.

The first couple of pages are narrated in the first person by a psychiatrist who is travelling through France on the same train as Ross. When the train is prevented from continuing on its journey to Rome due to a breakdown of the train ahead of them, the two men decide to have dinner together.

Over dessert, Ross suddenly asks the psychiatrist a question concerning dreams and reality. It is clear that Ross is concerned about his mental stability.

He stared at me across the table; there was a strained look about him, and I knew we were coming to the root of things...

I said gently: "We've got a long evening  before us. Would you like to tell me about it?"

What follows is a third person narrative of the events leading up to the meeting on the train. Donald Ross is employed by Oxford archaeologist, Mr. Lockwood, to pilot a plane to take him to Greenland on a surveying expedition.

Much to Ross's dismay, the don's very attractive but antagonistic daughter, Alix, insists on travelling with them, which seriously complicates their journey.

Nevil Shute usually includes a romantic thread in his stories and this book is no exception.

Upon reaching the old Viking colony at Brattalid, the combination of overwork, exhaustion and the use of medication to help him sleep, brings Ross to a point where he confuses reality.

At this point the chronology of the story fluctuates. The atmosphere of the old colony seeps into Ross's dreams and he becomes Haki, serving under Leif the Lucky with his woman, Hekja. When he awakes it is in a state of confusion. The dreams are so real; backed by evidence and circumstances.

It is an interesting twist to this unusual story but the book ends rather abruptly. Maybe Nevil Shute didn't know how to 'land' this one. Although it was an enjoyable, compelling story, it was a frustrating end for me as I kept thinking of what might have happened. 

During the expedition Ross grew fond of Alix. She began to appreciate his skill and his hard work and was genuinely concerned for his welfare when he was in a delirious state.  Did the budding romance fizzle out on their return to England? Why was Ross on a train to Rome at the beginning of the book and why didn't Shute take us back to the psychiatrist?

I read this in a Vintage Classic, one of the few paperbacks I'm happy to buy.

AusReading Month: The Rainbow and the Rose by Nevil Shute

Pilot Ronnie Clarke learns that Johnnie Pascoe, the man who had taught him to fly many years before, has crashed his plane while attempting to rescue a sick child from her isolated home on the rugged west coast of Tasmania. Pascoe is lying badly injured with only the child's mother to nurse him. The child's condition begins to improves but unless Pacoe receives medical attention for his fractured skull he will die.

Clarke is the narrator of the story and as he reminisces over the past and his association with the injured pilot, he makes the decision to go to the small town in Tasmania where Pascoe is based and endeavour to fly a doctor in to the area.

Clarke persuades the reluctant young local doctor to go with him and later finds out that he has never flown before. The first attempt to assist the injured man allows the doctor to drop a suitcase of medical equipment out of the plane onto the tiny airstrip next to the homestead but the doctor himself is unable to get out of the plane. Clarke returns to town as the weather conditions begin to deteriorate.

He spends the night at Pascoe's home waiting for a chance to try again the next day and learns about the older man's past, his secret history and painful memories.

As with all the books I've read by this author, I found the story simple but compelling. Nevil Shute has an easy style but he develops his characters so well. He has the ability to take a very ordinary sort of person, unwrap them and reveal their value and worth in the midst of their weaknesses and foibles. In doing this he helps the reader to empathise with his characters and I always come away from his books with a sense that he must have been a man who understood human nature but his response to that knowledge was not cynicism but kindness.

Throughout this book, Shute uses an interesting flashback technique which confused me at first and I wondered a few times what was going on. After a while I began to enjoy the way he used the technique even though it felt clunky at times. It was an interesting way to divulge information that the narrator would not have known.

This isn't one of his more well known books. Certainly, A Town Like Alice would be his best known book here in Australia and there was a TV mini-series of the story plus an earlier movie version. This is one version I've seen:

Other Nevil Shute books I've read and would recommend are:

Pied Piper  - set in WW2 in England and France.

On the Beach  - (near bottom of post) a novel dealing with a post nuclear catastrophe; set in Southern  Australian.

Nevil Shute Norway was born in England in 1899. He studied Engineering Science and worked as an aeronautical engineer. During World War 2 he worked on the development of secret weapons and after the war he settled in Australia where he lived until his death in 1960.

 Linking to Brona's Books:

Pied Piper by Nevil Shute

This is the second book by Neville Shute that I've read and enjoyed very much - the first was A Town Like Alice. In both books an elderly man is a central figure in the story; in the first as the narrator and in the second as the protagonist, and the author has expressed so well the pathos and weariness of men who have lived faithful, quiet and sensible lives but have struggled with the pain of sudden loss and disappointment.

Frustrated by his inability to aid the war effort, Englishman John Sidney Howard travels to the relative peace of a village in the French countryside in 1940 and waits for the fishing season to begin. Insulated by Switzerland from Germany, the village feels detached from the war but before long news comes of the capitulation of King Leopold of Belgium followed by the evacuation of Dunkirk and Howard makes up his mind to return to England.

Asked by some friends to take their two young children with him he agrees and commences what he thinks will be a straightforward journey across France to the coast where he plans to cross the Channel by boat but with the German invasion of France his original plans are thwarted and he has to conceal his British identity.
By the time he reaches the English Channel he has six children of multiple nationalities in his care, the Nazis are closing in and in an unexpected turn of events he is charged with the care of another child.

'Up to the last it had seemed incredible that he should not get through, hard though the way might be. But now he realised that he would not get through. The Germans were between him and the sea. In marching on to Angerville he was marching to disaster, to internment, probably to his death.

That did not worry him so much. He was old and tired; if an end came now he would be missing nothing very much. A few more days of fishing, a few more summers pottering in his garden. But the children - they were another matter. Somehow he must make them secure........

And what about the dirty little boy who was now with them, who had been stoned by old women mad with terror and blind hate? What would become of him?

The old man suffered a good deal.'

This book views World War II through the eyes of an unusual protagonist, making it a thought-provoking read well worth the time.