No Highway

Oh Nevil Shute, how are you so fascinating?
His books are always about these sort of greyish people who eventually triumph in the end because of their deep-down decency and competence.
There's usually a whole lot of technical details about airplanes.
And just when you're really getting into it, you get slapped in the face by attitudes of half a century ago.
And despite all this, they are addictive as all hell.

In this one, there's a genius engineer named Mr. Honey (not kidding) who is also a crackpot. He discovers a fatal flaw in some airplanes, and no one believes him except his boss who is neither a genius or a crackpot, but he is a decent guy.

So Mr Honey has to go on a crazy air journey halfway across the world, because that's what you show more do if you're a colorless shy decent genius in a Nevil Shute novel, and then of course some beautiful intelligent women fall in love with him (one of them is a movie star) and decide that the best use they could possibly make of their lives is to keep house for him and his daughter (his wife died tragically in the war) because being a genius apparently means that you have never heard of washing your floors.

Also he is the kindest bravest man who has ever existed but he mainly manifests this by blinking pathetically at ladies who then feel compelled to bring him Ovaltine. Plus he more or less ignores his daughter except when he is using her to experiment with some kind of Ouija Board technology.

Anyway, despite it being completely fucking ridiculous, I couldn't put it down. I don't know. show less

The Reindeer is the newest model of aircraft to ply the transatlantic route between the UK and Canada. It's fast, quiet and elegantly appointed. But there's a slight problem with it: the tailplane, which is of a unique design, may be subject to fatigue failure at only 1400 flying hours. Theodore Honey, the engineer whose research led to this hypothesis, is flying to Canada to figure out whether fatigue failure may have played a role in a previous plane crash, and then it turns out that his plane is also a Reindeer. Can the existence of this fatigue problem be found in time, and will Theodore arrive in Canada without mishap?

This is a delightfully nerdy book. Shute, as an aeronautical engineer, really knows his stuff, and his characters show more sound highly knowledgeable about the mechanics of metal fatigue and aircraft accident investigation. And yet even with all this information, the story remains tense and gripping as the reader waits to find out whether Theodore will be successful and whether his boss, Dr. Scott, will be able to keep the various authorities and interested parties on board long enough for his theory to be proven or disproven.

I did, however, roll my eyes extravagantly at the hero-worship of Theodore by two of the major women, a film star and the flight attendant on Theodore's plane. There are some grimace-inducing passages about the women thinking that they might not be clever enough to understand his work, but they want to support him in their own female domestic way, especially keeping his house clean and looking after his 12-year-old daughter, Elspeth, who is left somewhat to her own devices. I know this was written in the late 1940s, but it's awkward. Fortunately Dr. Scott's wife, Shirley, worked at the research firm before she married Dr. Scott (they met at the office), so there is at least one female character who doesn't think herself too dumb to understand men's work.

Overall, this is worth reading if you're interested in aircraft, accident investigation, or the basis of the 1951 movie starring Jimmy Stewart as Theodore Honey. show less

That's good - in a very Shute style. The investigation of technical matters relating to airplane safety - in this case, metal fatigue (very little understood at the time) leading to the tail of a particular type of aircraft literally falling off in the air - is the basis of the story; not a subject I know anything about, but I understood the matter probably as well as the narrator did (he says, multiple times, that he's not able to truly understand it but he trusts the researcher who does). Then the scientific facts (well, theories, at that point) run into personalities and politics and finances and on and on, and things get complicated. It's an odd story from several angles - there's at least two protagonists on the airplane side, and show more two more on the romance side (oh yeah, there's a romance. Or two, or one and a half...). And it's possibly the best depiction I've seen of the way work doesn't wait until you're done with one thing to present you with another! Fun story, well-written (of course), worth reading and likely worth rereading in a couple years. show less

I wasn't sure how to rate this. It's a curious mixture of the gripping and the absolutely mundane. The gripping part involves a search by a bunch of engineers to prove that the tail wing of a new passenger plane contains a latent design flaw (which admittedly doesn't sound that gripping, but in Nevil Shute's hands becomes so) while the mundane part concerns pretty much everything else, specifically a horrendous domestic drama involving a cast of insipid female characters straight out of a Cholmondley Warner sketch.

Honestly, I'm not sure why Shute thought this constituted the "bits that make it fun" as he more or less makes one of his characters say on the final page. I'm not even sure if it would've been particularly fun for his show more readers at the time. With the exception of the narrator's wife, it would be hard to call these characters anything other than vapidly drawn caricatures, a sort of wish fulfilment wife fancy for men of the 1940s, I suppose, loyal, sweet tempered, a bit dim but keen to learn all the domestic duties required of them. And ever so pretty. Etc.

Another thing which bothered me was that Shute frequently violated one of the principal rules of POV by narrating several chapters outside of the experience of the main character (the book is written in the first person). I'm not usually a massive stickler for things like that, but the fact that pretty much all these chapters involved the nonsense above made them seem especially pointless.

Luckily the main story is a belter, and Shute has an excellent way of conveying pretty technical engineering terms to the layman in a clear and concise manner. Had the book focussed purely on this aspect of the story and cut out all the fluff I'd probably be rating it a four. show less

I wasn't sure how to rate this. It's a curious mixture of the gripping and the absolutely mundane. The gripping part involves a search by a bunch of engineers to prove that the tail wing of a new passenger plane contains a latent design flaw (which admittedly doesn't sound that gripping, but in Nevil Shute's hands becomes so) while the mundane part concerns pretty much everything else, specifically a horrendous domestic drama involving a cast of insipid female characters straight out of a Cholmondley Warner sketch.

Honestly, I'm not sure why Shute thought this constituted the "bits that make it fun" as he more or less makes one of his characters say on the final page. I'm not even sure if it would've been particularly fun for his show more readers at the time. With the exception of the narrator's wife, it would be hard to call these characters anything other than vapidly drawn caricatures, a sort of wish fulfilment wife fancy for men of the 1940s, I suppose, loyal, sweet tempered, a bit dim but keen to learn all the domestic duties required of them. And ever so pretty. Etc.

Another thing which bothered me was that Shute frequently violated one of the principal rules of POV by narrating several chapters outside of the experience of the main character (the book is written in the first person). I'm not usually a massive stickler for things like that, but the fact that pretty much all these chapters involved the nonsense above made them seem especially pointless.

Luckily the main story is a belter, and Shute has an excellent way of conveying pretty technical engineering terms to the layman in a clear and concise manner. Had the book focussed purely on this aspect of the story and cut out all the fluff I'd probably be rating it a four. show less

I never thought I'd gobble up a 1948 book about flight engineering. But then, considering my history with Nevil Shute, I really shouldn't be surprised.

Nevil Shute was the author of the first 'grown up' book I ever read - A Town Like Alice when I was nine. My love for that book is eternal, and has been added by a love of On The Beach, but I haven't really been able to get into some of Shute's other books.

Until this one. It tells the story of Theodore Honey; a quiet, unsociable man, widowed during the second world war and trying to bring up a young daughter. He's quite brilliant - not only in the area of fatigue in planes (which is the focus of the book) - but also in 'stranger' areas, such as 'spirit reading'. When he is sent off from show more England to Canada to examine a wreckage of a Reindeer plane, he discovers that he is flying in a rather unsafe version of the same plane. So he decides to ground it. Dramatically.

Nevil Shute's books, although technical, are all about the characters. Honey is joined by a strong group - from his young daughter, to the pilot of the plane, to the young air hostess and aging actress who both foster quiet affection from the man. The story is told by Dr. Dennis Scott - Honey's boss - which is one of the techniques I love about Nevil Shute books.

Although this wasn't a thriller or action novel by any stretch of the imagination - I found myself holding my breath during important meetings, and at key moments. I stayed up way later than intended to get it finished. show less

A lot of technical stuff about airplanes mixed with lots of human interest. Shute often writes about airplanes, and it's good knowing that he really knows about them.

BTW, Feminists should probably give this one a miss. In 1948 it seemed to make sense that a brilliant scientist needed a woman to keep his house clean and bring up his daughter properly.