Critics called this wartime novelist a ‘lightweight'. Nonsense

Telegraph

13-04-2025

Half a century ago, Nevil Shute was one of the best-known English novelists. He had a huge following, one that would persist for a while after he died, just before his 61st birthday, in 1960. But Shute was a novelist for different times, and that popularity has since waned. Only a few of his works have maintained their high reputation, most notably A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957). Both were made into highly successful films, in 1956 and 1959 respectively, sealing Shute's fame – at least for a time.
He had been writing novels since the 1920s, while pursuing a career as an aeronautical engineer. He practised his profession under his real name, Nevil Norway, fearing he would not be taken seriously if it were known he wrote fiction in his spare time. Aeronautics and scientific knowledge generally play a large part in many of his novels, but particularly those related to the Second World War. Beyond A Town Like Alice, there are three further such novels, yet they are largely forgotten, and borne down by their author's reputation as a lightweight. Re-reading them today, one realises both why he was popular and that he was not lightweight at all.
What Happened to the Corbetts, the first of these, was written in 1938, and published in 1939, days after Neville Chamberlain had told Hitler that a German invasion of Poland would provoke all-out war. The novel describes, with remarkable accuracy and foresight, the effect of mass aerial bombing on a British city. Shute chose Southampton, to whose inhabitants he apologised. He was keen to use a real and not a fictional town to bring home the realities of such an assault. Shute later said that he had not properly appreciated the extent to which firestorms would spread after bombing; but otherwise the destruction, the disruption, the fear are all vividly depicted.
Shute's characters are usually people such as him: from the professional middle classes, with a good grasp of practicalities, and called upon to solve problems. In What Happened to the Corbetts, the problems are no water, no food and the threat of cholera. Corbett himself is a lawyer and has a small boat, and there is a sense that in parts of the city less fortunate than where they live, things are even worse. He manages to sail his boat along England's southern coast, taking his wife and their three small children with him, and rescues two Fleet Air Arm men who have been shot down. The Navy thanks them by giving them assistance to sail to northern France, whereupon the wife and children are put on a boat to Canada, and Corbett does his duty by joining the Navy. In a final successful prophecy, Shute has a Frenchman say that Britain will win the war because the Dominions will come in and the Americans will provide aid.
Landfall: A Channel Story was written in 1940 and set in the Phoney War. A young pilot is thrilled to have bombed and sunk a U-boat; but it then seems that he has in fact sunk a British submarine. The book is devoted to the pilot's redemption – he bravely volunteers to fly a plane testing a new missile, in the course of which he crashes into the sea – but it transpires later that he had no need to be redeemed: the British submarine that was sunk had in fact been hit by the U-boat (which the pilot had sunk subsequently). The key part of the story is how the pilot's girlfriend – a barmaid – picks up information that leads to the discovery of the U-boat's responsibility, careless talk on this occasion not costing lives.
Pastoral (1944) is another tale of aerial heroics, about the crew of a bomber whose commander suffers from combat fatigue and is distracted by an unsatisfactory love affair with a woman from the WAAF. Shute focuses on relations between fighting men, but sets the story against a backdrop of English rural life, and especially the men's shared interest in angling. Critics also detected a theme of continuity: of nature and human relationships being more powerful than conflict. All these war-related novels, along with much else written by Shute, display not only his genius as a storyteller but also how he reflected the world around him. Eighty years after the war's conclusion, he richly deserves rediscovery.