June 2026: Nevil Shute

In June, we are revising the English writer Nevil Shute (1899–1960) who spent his last years in Australia. He is one of the authors for whom writing came as a second career - after spending a lifetime in aviation (although he had been writing at the same time).

Last time we visited him, I read his two most popular works (A Town Like Alice and On the Beach) and had been planning on returning to him for awhile. What do you plan to read this month?

I’ve got my eye on Slide Rule.

I have recently reread the complete works, so delighted to get involved in discussion in June. Town is probably my favourite, but I have a very soft spot for his last work, Trustee from the Toolroom

Nominations open for next quarter here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/384764#

I will probably read On the Beach. When we did him last time round I read A Town Like Alice.

I have finished On the Beach tonight. This is an excellent, horrific and haunting Cold War post-apocalyptic novel written in 1957 and set in the near future of 1963 in a south eastern Australia which is one of the few parts of the world free from the effects of nuclear war that has wiped out Europe, North America and Asia. At the outset of the novel, it is the Antipodean summer and the Christmas-New Year period, and only parts of South America, South Africa and the Antipodes survive, as the deadly radiation inexorably creeps south, with the prediction that the whole world will be wiped out by September. The characters exist in a bizarre half world, in which most people continue to go about their lives as normally as they can, even planning for the future in terms of planting crops or trees for the following year. There is little of the panic and extreme hedonistic behaviour that is often seen in post-apocalyptic novels and indeed in real life apocalyptic historical scenarios such as the Black Death. This struck me as somewhat implausible and perhaps a reflection of the mores of the time the novel was written. Nevertheless, it gave the (some what stereotypical 1950s) characters and the narrative through which they moved a certain dignified pathos that I found moving, as events crept towards the final inevitable end, with most people choosing to die through taking officially distributed suicide pills rather than letting the effects of radiation poisoning run their full course. This was an electric and gripping read, fundamentally depressing but very stark and thought provoking about the nature of human relations, loyalty and managing in a crisis.

I have finished Marazan and have to say I didn’t like this at all. It was his first published novel (in 1926) and it had many faults. Too much technical details for aeroplane and sailing nerds, whereas the plot involving the escaped convict and the drug-running gang is way too thin. The colloquialisms of the day had been pruned for my 1965 re-publication copy, and there were still too many of them left. Which makes the narrator sound like an upper-class twat. And, well, his attitude towards anyone not born an Englishman leaves a bad taste. As in: the drug-runners are all Dagoes or Chinks, of course, with absolutely no awareness of the industrial-scale drug-running that the East India Company carried out only a few decades before.
I have fond memories of A town like Alice, so I hope his later books have aged better than this.