Word: toolroom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM (311 pp.)_A/ew/ Shute-Morrow...
...late Nevil Shute took characters of clay and left them shod with steel. Keith Stewart, hero of Shute's posthumous novel, Trustee from the Toolroom, is unassuming to the point of extinction. Keith is past his prime, hard up, pastily pale and running a little to fat. In an ugly mortgaged home in the London suburb of West Baling, he shares teatime monosyllables with his dumpily comfortable wife Katie. Yet Keith is not a nonentity...
...which he writes articles on the tiny models of locomotives, generators, planes, and assorted engines he himself designs. At the drop of a soldering iron or the wrong twist of a vise, like-minded hobbyists from Havana to Hong Kong lay their problems on the workbench of this toolroom Da Vinci. Patiently, Keith answers each letter. Just as patiently, he seals a little copper box of his sister's "trinkets" in the ballasting of his brother-in-law's yacht, and agrees to take care of the couple's ten-year-old daughter Janice while the pair...
...death Shute left a novel, Trustee from the Toolroom, April Book-of-the-Month; like his other books, it will probably be a rattling good story and no literary masterpiece. No mound of Ph.D. theses on symbols and significance is likely to be stacked over Shute's books. Yet later years may find them a remarkably reliable portrait of mid-20th century man and his concerns. Shute himself read little, but in Henry James's words, he qualified as "one of the people on whom nothing is lost...