Word: shutes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...BEACH (320 pp.)-Nevil Shute-Morrow...
This is the situation as Author Nevil Shute (Pied Piper, The Breaking Wave) opens his 21st novel. To U.S. Commander Dwight Towers, who has brought his atom-powered submarine safely to port in Melbourne, the death in the north has no meaning. He still dreams of returning from duty to his wife and children in Mystic. Conn. A young Australian couple, Peter and Mary Holmes, use habit as an escape from the horror to come; they go on as they always have-sailing, giving parties, worrying when their small daughter has a sore throat or fever. Moira Davidson at first...
There is a grisly fascination to Author Shute's story of mankind's last days. Yet his characters seem curiously bloodless despite their courage and stoicism. It is difficult to believe that men and women would die as these do-without panic, self-seeking, sexual frenzy, or apocalyptic evangelism. But then it is also difficult to believe in the end of the world...
...Author Shute, himself a "pommy," declared before he prepared to take his talents (and his private gardener) to Australia in 1951: "It is a long time since a first-class novelist has worked in the southern hemisphere." This book does nothing to alter that situation. Before his writing lifted him into rarefied financial levels, Shute was an aeronautical engineer who helped design and fly Britain's dirigible R.100 on its transatlantic flight of 1930.* His fiction has some of the improbable, inflated, but often entertaining quality of the lighter-than-air-machines...
...Shute's novel, No Highway (1948), gave an imaginative account of an airliner's disintegration through metal fatigue, which seemed very nearly prophetic in the light of the British Comet crashes...