Saturday, April 28, 2018

Inspecting Silence in Nesser's The Inspector and Silence

I had not heard of Nesser when I picked up the book. Initially, it was a bit disconcertingly unlike the usual Nordic Noir crime novels. However, it soon dawned on me that this was quality writing. A good book is one which enchants and informs. And this Nesser has opened me to music and cinema and more in the most delightful way. However, it is also fairly satisfactory as far as mystery goes.
  
The most heinous part of a crime such as murder is the silence - the silence of death, of the victim, of scared witnesses, of the murderer. Here is a novel that offers all these and more.
When during the heat of a sweltering summer an anonymous woman caller telephones Acting Chief of Police Kluuge informing him that a girl is missing from the summer camp of the strange religious sect, The Pure Life, he sends for Chief Inspector Van Veeteren.




Unlike so many fictional detectives, Van Veeteren is relatively well-adjusted. His combination of wryly matter-of-fact observations and philosophical ruminations are thoroughly enjoyable -- and believable -- in this twisty layered tale that should keep even seasoned mystery fans guessing.

And there is the locale that, also, takes a twist. Nordic Noir - the very words have crunch, munch and ooze dark deep deliciousness - is associated with Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Denmark... . However, here it is an invented elsewhere, with most of the Nordic ambience intact.    

One of the mysteries of a Håkan Nesser novel is the setting: It could be Sweden, but the place names sound distinctly Dutch, as does the surname of the protagonist, Inspector Van Veeteren. The action plays out in and around Maardam, a fictitious city “somewhere in Northern Europe,” with landscapes distinctly more Scandinavian than Benelux. 
And that is not all that puts Håkan Nesser's The Inspector and Silence in a genre of its own.


 The interview helped me better understand the man and, as bonus, I got to see his dog - I had read that he had a dog and that he had been a school teacher. 

Indeed, the novel is a delightful education of sorts. The Inspector, when not relishing cognac with coffee, or a nibble of good cheese, reads or listens to music and, as if that is not enough, catches a good film at the local cinema hall, too.


M.Strīķis, via Wikimedia Commons

In most senses, we proceed normally, tackling questions - Who is so and so? Why did x do such and such? What happens next?




The Inspector's routine for handling 'what the hell should he do' is to sit in a beautiful spot and do something pleasurable! 

As fast and furious thunder the anti-smoking brigade, so French and Japanese films, for example, seem to delight in characters who smoke and are, usually, hot. Nesser's Inspector gets my vote for ending a chapter with 
"Not a minute too soon for a glass and a cigarette" 
With all that good cheer, music is a must. From Bach to Pergolesi, Nesser's book brings us music:



I almost always discover a "new" piece of music reading a Nesser book. Van Veeteren is quite a music lover, and this read led me to Penderecki's Requiem.




Back to the book with more Bach...




Novels are prone to platitudes. The good novelist asks: What on earth do those platitudinous platitudes mean?

And, perhaps, some more tongue-in-cheek about platitudes concerning the skills of detectives:



Just as Nesser has invented the 'where' of it all, I suspect that a poet and a writer mentioned in the book are, both, fictional. Here is where the tragedy of translated fiction lies that we are at the mercy of whatever is translated and much is, necessarily, beyond our ken.

From music and literature we come to cinema. The Inspector catches a screening of Kaos by the Taviani brothers:




Though there is a rich IMDB page for Nesser, I cannot find anything that I can share, alas. 

We have seen how the silence, in which the Inspector inspects the silences of the witnesses, is punctuated by the eternally good things of life - works of literary merit, music, food and drink and all else that is real and beautiful in life. For larger than life crimes are rarer than the media would like us to think.

Finally, there is the process of writing which Nesser amusingly unfurls for us, with a flourish, every now and then:



Notice the trio of phrases that sets the scene in our minds. Like a haiku. 

And the tongue-in-cheek 'upright' envy is a marvellous phallic tribute to the moral malevolence of the 'good people'. Observe the adherence to concepts of flow - how one paragraph ends with a word and the following one echoes the precedent.

Speaking of things moral, the Inspector is agnostic. And ethics is handled here on a higher register than is usual to such works. In silence, the Inspector balances two crimes: the crime itself and the crime of false accusation.  



In another laudable move, without fanfare, the author brings us a world where a sari is an acceptable term, without a need for italics - such a supremely understated way of making the world one without the fanfare of a Mankell who makes the other so exotic that we can also throw in exotic crimes as natural to exotic races. 

There is more detail, in the novel, about various meals than there is, mercifully, about the brutal crimes. I mean, how many brutalised corpses can one read about, at the end of the day?  



"Two bottles of beer, some crispbread, a little plastic tub of marinated garlic cloves and a few generous slices of game pâté."

Geoff Peters, Duck Liver Pâté and baguette
an Nesser

is wife Elke (a psychiatristAt its core, The Inspector and Silence is an old-fashioned whodunit-style crime novel, a nicely crafted mystery with a minimum of high technology and forensics. At the end of the day, it is solid police work, feet on the ground, that solves the crime. Though clearly an anonymous tipster helps advance the investigation in meaningful, if rather abstract, ways. DI Van Veeteren seems to fancy himself along the lines of a Nordic Nero Wolfe, where his mood is only as good as his last meal. There's nothing wrong with this characterization in and of itself, but whereas Nero Wolfe's pompousness comes across as elegant and refined, Van Veeteren's comes across more as aloof and autocratic. True, he's nearing retirement and no doubt looks forward to days of wine and roses, but when compared to the brutality of the crimes he's investigating, his attitude seems a bit callous at times. But this could simply be a translation issue.

However, there are two sides to this coin - after all, it is an age where everyone is screeching "Do something!":
Van Veeteren is faced with a case of the most horrible nature, in which he has little evidence. He must solve it with a combination of logic and intuition. He has only ever failed to solve one case, for he builds them slowly, contemplatively, patiently. He watches and waits. And this method works for him: the cases are almost always solved. Some readers may enjoy partaking in this grimly methodical manner of deduction. Some may be bored senseless.


If I have to find fault, at times I felt, in the early parts, that there were some hiccoughs of translation - but mostly those worked out with adorable quaintness. Perhaps it is the very erudition of the author that presents a challenge to the translator.

I've yet to find a name for this genre that I detect in the book - the best way to find out would be to read another Nesser.

However, lined up for the immediate future are a Paul Theroux and a Camilla Läckberg.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Shoot! We forgot Nevil Shute - Part VIII

With two popular tales and one that has not pleased some reviewers, we come to the end of the Nevil Shute series. The first one here is set in the back of beyond...



'Culture clash is the subject of "Beyond the Black Stump", set in the American northwest in 1954, where people think of themselves as pioneers, and Western Australia, where they are. The hero is Stanton Laird, an American geologist who has worked all over the world for the Topeka Exploration Company, most recently in Arabia. As the story opens, he is vacationing in his home town of Hazel, Oregon.'

You can preview the book from the Amazon cover below:

Now, we can move beyond that stump to On the Beach 
'The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere following a nuclear war a year previously. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently.'

“On the Beach” is however unlike many other post-apocalyptic novels (except “The Road”) due to its ending. Many movies and dark novels of today that remark upon the end of the human race enjoy teasing the reader and viewer with last-minute twists and deus ex machina’s such as in the movies “Children of Men” and “The Book of Eli” and McCarthy’s novel-made-film “The Road”. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does muddle the waters between grey realism and optimistic fantasy.
Shute’s novel here ends like the poet T.S. Elliot wrote, “Not with a bang, but a whimper.” As the lethal clouds of radiation go south, the scene of the world goes silent and the characters that are left take their cyanide pills and die. The world gradually eases into oblivion and silence in Shute’s vision, and as the reader we are left with a sense of both fear and dread that this is a possible future for the world if humanity spirals into the chaos of war once again.
Some critics complained that the book's resolutely low-key depiction of human extinction was unconvincing: people just wouldn't die that way. Yet readers identified readily with the characters' quiet dignity. This conventional novel about unconventional weapons became "the most influential work of its kind for the next quarter of a century and the only one most people ever read"

Waltzing Matilda - On The Beach (1959)

“It frightened the hell out of me. I’m still frightened.”
These words mark the reaction of a young Australian named Helen Caldicott to a story of the aftermath of mistaken nuclear war, in which those who never even took sides were faced with the slow advance of deadly nuclear radiation on their shores. On the Beach, first a best-selling novel and then a major Hollywood film, confronts the viewer with a number of questions: How would you behave if—in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse—you knew you only have a few weeks or months left to live? Would you carouse riotously, knowing the end is near? Deny that the entire thing is happening? Hope against all logic for a miraculous reprieve? Try to maintain a core of decency in the face of imminent death? Wish that you had done something long ago to prevent nuclear war in the first place?




And now for another one about which readers have not exactly raved:

The Rainbow and the Rose  'One man's three love stories; narration shifts from the narrator to the main character and back.'

Preview it as I have no link to the book, alas - but then there are those who lump it with the Beyond book that we've glanced at above:
“The Rainbow and the Rose” (1958) has pilot Ronnie Clarke, trying to save retired senior Johnnie Pascoe who has crashed on a medical evacuation mission and is seriously injured, dream about the latter’s chequered life while resting overnight in Pascoe’s house after his first attempt to land a doctor there fails.


I love the stories of Nevil Shute. He describes things beautifully and doesn’t hurry through the telling. He takes care to build very human characters in interesting and believable situations that reveal their best qualities. His male characters are decent, kind and hardworking. His female characters are intelligent and hardworking, as well. I enjoyed reading The Rainbow and the Rose for exactly those reasons.



Trustee from the Toolroom appears to be well liked for many reasons.

Trustee from the Toolroom is a tremendously compelling and well-plotted adventure story from 1960 about a mild-mannered English columnist for a hobbyist magazine called Miniature Mechanic who is duty bound to recover a container of valuable jewels from his dead brother's wrecked yacht in the South Pacific. (Fun fact from Wikipedia: "Trustee from the Toolroom was voted #27 on the Modern Library Readers' list of the top 100 novels.
Shute's books are low-key, but his plots are assembled like Swiss watches -- every piece fits perfectly, and you simply can't put one down after you're 50 pages into it. They also contain astounding technical realism -- far more than you'd think could hold his readers' attention, much less keep them spellbound.

An academic paper examines how appropriate this author was for the times: 
Both in his own right and as a representative figure he deserves analysis on account of his part in the literary re-statement of what has fairly been called the ‘imperial idea,’ that matrix of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes which had sustained and rationalized the endeavors of several generations of politicians, publicists, and civil servants, but whose relevance to Great Britain's circumstances after the Second World War was increasingly open to doubt.

Reactions apart, Nevil Shute's novels continue to be engaging. Here is list of important links for avid fans of Nevil Shute:

All that's left is for you to read this Pied Piper of a novelist on a beach, perhaps in a town like Alice or in a toolroom, with a rainbow and a rose.

After this long ramble through nostalgia, the blog returns to the here and now with upcoming posts featuring reviews of three recently read novels - A Paul Theroux and two Nordic Noir thrillers. 

Monday, April 16, 2018

Shoot! We forgot Nevil Shute - Part VII

Time Travel?


Published in 1953, In the Wet speaks of the 1980s, using the future as canvas for the author's political thought.
In the Wet begins with 80 pages (in the Canadian hardcover) of setup. A British Church of England parson explains, in first person, that he’s spent much of his life in Australia, that he has malaria, and the circumstances in which he meets a drunken old man called Stevie, and then comes to be at Stevie’s bedside during the wet season, as Stevie is dying. Stevie relates his life story—only he doesn’t, the priest has malaria and is delirious, a nurse who was also present the whole time heard nothing. Also, the life Stevie tells is a life that takes place in the future—the book was published and this frame is set in 1953, the main part of the story takes place in 1983. It’s Stevie’s next life as David Anderson that we hear about.



Just as Pied Piper was suggested as the first Nevil Shute novel to read, In the Wet is considered exemplary by at least one reviewer:
some of the themes that have made Nevil's books so popular... show up in all his novels; some in only a few. But only "In The Wet" includes every one.
  1. A love story (All but a few NSN novels)
  2. Romantic pairings bridging social classes (Lonely Road, Ruined City, Landfall)
  3. An adventure story (Just about every novel)
  4. A flying story (Marazan, So Disdained, Landfall, Pastoral, Rainbow)
  5. A sailing story (Lonely Road, Most Secret)
  6. A subplot involving reincarnation (An Old Captivity)
  7. A subplot involving thought/soul transference (An Old Captivity, Rainbow)
  8. The economic disaster of socialism (The Far Country)
  9. Racial and national equality (Chequer Board, Round the Bend)
  10. A glimpse into the future (Ordeal, On The Beach)
  11. The use of the anti-hero (Chequer Board, Trustee)
  12. Special extra-sensory abilities among non-European "primitive" people. (An Old Captivity, Chequer Board, Round The bend)
  13. An interest in eastern religious teachings (Chequer Board, Round the Bend)
  14. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. (Just about every novel)
An "Unbiased" Review

In the Wet - 'contains many of the typical elements of a hearty and adventurous Shute yarn such as flying, the future, mystic states, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things.' - Wikipedia

Use the preview on the Amazon cover below to get a feel and read the novel by clicking on the link in the title above.


I've skipped Slide Rule as it is autobiographical and would be of real interest only to hard core Nevil Shute fans. The next book of his that we shall deal with sounds very tragic. 

Requiem for a Wren - 'The story of a young British woman who, plagued with guilt after shooting down a plane carrying Polish refugees in World War II, moves to Australia to work anonymously for the parents of her (now deceased) Australian lover, whilst the lover's brother searches for her in Britain. The title echoes William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun.




This is one of Shute’s “full circle” novels, in which he tosses us in at the ending, and then works us backwards through what brought his characters to that starting point. It’s a plot device which can get a little tiresome if encountered too often, but in this case it works very well indeed.
Recommended, emphatically, for Shute fans, and, speculatively, for those new to this author, who might appreciate a slightly simplistic but thought-provoking view of the effects of war on its participants, by a man who lived much of what he wrote about.

The novel has drawn a variety of reactions with most finding the tragedy hard to handle and yet reviewers find the usual charm of a Nevil Shute - a special something in each book which draws and holds the reader:
Requiem for a Wren is ultimately a rather sad story, but it is also full of sunny moments and small victories. By the end, you are left rather like Alan is, in love with Janet, unable to have her, but glad you got to know her so well anyway.

The next post completes this sequential look at Nevil Shute's novels with Beyond the Black Stump, On the Beach, The Rainbow and the Rose, Trustee from the Toolroom - at least two of those are quite popular even today.

Shoot! We forgot Nevil Shute - Part VI

Here are three Nevil Shute novels that are better known and which I'm sure I have read - ages ago, of course! 

As usual, you can read the novels by clicking on the title and/or enjoy a preview via the Amazon.com book covers.



A Town Like Alice 'US title: The Legacy. The hero and heroine meet while both are prisoners of the Japanese in Malaya (now Malaysia). After the war they seek each other out and reunite in a small Australian town that would have no future if not for her plans to turn it into "a town like Alice."' - Wikipedia

Official film trailer - 1956


In Nevil Shute’s most beloved novel, a tale of love and war, we follow Jean Paget, its enterprising heroine, from the Malayan jungle during World War II to the rugged Australian outback.

Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children. A few years after the war, Jean is back in England, the nightmare behind her. However, an unexpected inheritance inspires her to return to Malaya to give something back to the villagers who saved her life. But it turns out that they have a gift for her as well: the news that the young Australian soldier, Joe Harmon, who had risked his life to help the women, had miraculously survived. Jean’s search for Joe leads her to a desolate Australian outpost called Willstown, where she finds a challenge that will draw on all the resourcefulness and spirit that carried her through her wartime ordeals.


It was made into a film again, later, and there is also a TV series - alas, I can't offer you more than just another trailer:

The thing about this book is that it’s wonderfully nostalgic in a very specific way. It reminds me of the piles upon piles of old, musty novels that my Grandad had stored in the shed by his farmhouse, sitting on home-crafted shelves made of wooden planks and lived in by small, thin spiders and sparrows’ nests. They were from all the decades before the computer was invented, with leathery backs, ripped paper jackets, and pages the colour of sand at dusk. But they were books, and the magic of a book, if I can be emotional for a second, is that the story in it, if it is good, forgives everything else; in fact, transforms everything else into part of the happy experience, into part of the magic. A Town Like Alice is one of these books.

Next we have Round The Bend 'a 1951 novel by Nevil Shute. It tells the story of Constantine "Connie" Shaklin, an aircraft engineer who founds a new religion transcending existing religions based on the merit of good work. It deals with racism, including the White Australia policy, and also with the importance of private enterprise. It was one of the first novels Shute wrote after emigrating from Britain to Australia in 1950.' - Wikipediaa 1951 novel by Nevil Shute. It tells the story of Constantine "Connie" Shaklin, an aircraft engineer who founds a new religion transcending existing religions based on the merit of good work. It deals with racism, including the White Australia policy, and also with the importance of private enterprise. It was one of the first novels Shute wrote after emigrating from Britain to Australia in 1950.a 1951 novel by Nevil Shute. It tells the story of Constantine "Connie" Shaklin, an aircraft engineer who founds a new religion transcending existing religions based on the merit of good work. It deals with racism, including the White Australia policy, and also with the importance of private enterprise. It was one of the first novels Shute wrote after emigrating from Britain to Australia in 1950. a 1951 novel by Nevil Shute. It tells the story of Constantine "Connie" Shaklin, an aircraft engineer who founds a new religion transcending existing religions based on the merit of good work. It deals with racism, including the White Australia policy, and also with the importance of private enterprise. It was one of the first novels Shute wrote after emigrating from Britain to Australia in 1950.

Round the Bend" is a curious book in many ways. To me, it actually has a flavour of science fiction. It's writing about a world very different to mine - the world of my parents.
Technology is very different. Aviation is still taking off. It takes a couple of weeks to travel half-way round the world in a small plane. The world is still a large place and people have very little knowledge of what life is like in other countries.
Racial prejudice is a basic fact of life. The idea of marrying someone of another race is inconceivable - not in the sense that it is terrible, but because you literally would never conceive of doing so. People of non-white races get lower wages as a matter of course, or may be banned totally from working in some places.
Set against this background, what we actually have is a novel about people of different races and faiths working together in harmony. It's the world of aviation pilots and engineers, where the shared fascination with planes leads to respect and friendship.
It's also a world (which reminded me a little of 'Stranger in a Strange Land') where one man can start a new form of religion.
What I like about Shute is that he tells the story. He never rants on (and nor do his characters) about things being good or bad - they live their lives and deal with things as they are. He doesn't try to manipulate the reader.
His characters are seen through the eye of the engineer.



Round the Bend has 'spiritual' overtones:

he meets his old friend Connie Shaklin - a first class aircraft engineer, half European, half Asian, who joins his operation as Chief engineer,
Connie's method of teaching aircraft maintenance combines the practical and spiritual - right thinking and good work are inseparable. An ascetic and modest man, Connie is soon established as a religious teacher in Bahrein gaining the respect of the local Imams and Sheik. The book unfolds the story of the spread of this teaching throughout the Middle and Far East among ground engineers and religious leaders. This spread parallels the development of Tom's aviation business eastward from Bahrein to Australia.


The Far Country 'In this novel, Shute has some harsh things to say about the new (British) National Health Service, as well as the socialist Labour government, themes he would later develop more fully in In the Wet. He describes the lot of the 'New Australians'; refugees who are required to work for two years where they are placed, in return for free passage to Australia.' - Wikipedia



The title, The Far Country , refers to the distance not only of Australia from England, of Jennifer from her parents back in Leicester, when most travel was by sea, but also of England from Australia, of the austerity in Britain only dimly perceived by the now prosperous Dormans in the back blocks of Victoria. So yes, I enjoyed The Far Country as a simple story well told, but also as a social history of the times and locales of my earliest years.


All three novels are well recommended, with A Town like Alice and Far Country ringing the pioneer spirit nostalgia and Round the Bend bringing us an Indonesian mystic.

In the next post we look at In the Wet, Slide Rule, and Requiem for a Wren, the middle one being autobiographical.
a 1951 novel by Nevil Shute. It tells the story of Constantine "Connie" Shaklin, an aircraft engineer who founds a new religion transcending existing religions based on the merit of good work. It deals with racism, including the White Australia policy, and also with the importance of private enterprise. It was one of the first novels Shute wrote after emigrating from Britain to Australia in 1950.
a 1951 novel by Nevil Shute. It tells the story of Constantine "Connie" Shaklin, an aircraft engineer who founds a new religion transcending existing religions based on the merit of good work. It deals with racism, including the White Australia policy, and also with the importance of private enterprise. It was one of the first novels Shute wrote after emigrating from Britain to Australia in 1950.

Lackberg's The Ice Child Lacks Lustre

The book opens very satisfyingly. The setting is very dramatic - snow, darkness, horses, a figure clad in red... In other words, the cover picture.

Camilla Lackberg's novel is the exact opposite of the Hakan Nesser 
recently reviewed on this blog. The Lackberg is of the genre that thrives on portraits of ultimate evil. The story opens with a girl erupting into view. A girl who has been thoroughly brutalised. And the ending is also so satisfactory to the purpose that it screams overkill.



Written, as it is, by a woman, one would expect the book to offer some female character that is memorable. However, the characters are very laboured with neither man, woman, husband, wife, mother, son, daughter nor anyone emerging engagingly. 

The relationship between the main characters, Detective Patrik Hedström and crime writer Erica, is annoyingly cloying, at best, and archaic, at worst. The novel sighs its way through traditional MIL behaviour, and other such antediluvian swamps. Incidental children are tossed hither and thither through the narrative. Caring for these joyless burdens traumatises our protagonists as much as does the physical torture inflicted on the victims of the crimes being investigated.  
Erica is writing a new book inspired by an old family tragedy that ended with the death of a man: a man who had arrived in Fjallbacka with the circus... Now an expert in research and interviews with the victims, Erica is seeking the common thread that can lead to the truth behind this story. Despite countless visits to the wife of the man who was convicted for the murder, her researches appear to have come to a dead end... 
When Patrik Hedström and his team received the alarm about the accident that occurred near the woods, the victim has already been identified... On her body, in addition to the injuries due to the crash, the girl bears wounds that witness unimaginable atrocities and slowly it happears clear that there is a possibility that she is not the last and only victim.


The book is full of unnatural beings - psychopaths - on the one hand, and a plodding 'normalcy', on the other, as if the demented 'murderers' are the only plague besetting an otherwise wonderful world. A wonderful premise. If only that were the truth! 
The Ice Child by its nature challenges our complacency about evil, particularly in an age that rightly or wrongly is determined to find social and psychological explanations rather than to acknowledge that evil might exist as an entity of itself. “The girl looked so happy and innocent, so unaware of the evil that existed in the world. But Laila could have told her all about it. How evil could live right next to what was good, in a community where people wore blinkers and refused to see what was right in front of their noses. Once you saw evil up close, you could never close your eyes to it again. That was her curse and her responsibility”. As I was reading The Ice Child, the case of child murderers Rachel Trelfa and Nyomi Fee was going through British courts. It seems Laila’s point is well made.


One can imagine that this sort of thing lends itself obediently to film versions given the universal craving to be convinced of Ultimate Evil.


Camilla Lackberg's The Fjällbacka Murders Box Set Trailer



Much is explained when you read about the author:
The first thing you notice about Swedish crime-writing sensation Camilla Läckberg is that she is really quite beautiful. The second thing is the 39-year-old’s disarming honesty about her approach to crime fiction.


By Lesula, from Wikimedia Commons
She was picked by readers of a Swedish newspaper as “Woman of the Year” in March. She’s a celebrity contestant on the nation’s version of “Dancing With the Stars.” She is married to Martin Melin, a police sergeant in Stockholm, who became a national sex symbol after winning “Expedition Robinson,” the Swedish “Survivor,” in 1997.

They have five children from their blended families (two each from prior relationships, one child together). His blog, “Coola Pappor” (“Cool Dads”), is such a hit that it led to a book with the same title last fall...
Between crime novels, Lackberg paired with a childhood friend to write a cookbook, “The Taste of Fjallbacka,” which was so popular that it led to a second. She wrote a children’s book about her and Melin’s child, “Super Charlie,” which became a game on an iPhone app.
He tattooed her name on his rib cage and rides a Harley. She has been known to pose in a bikini.

All I can say is that Camilla lacks what it takes to do honour to the crime genre in novels. While a monster is certainly a crowd puller, it is equally monstrous to pull several psychopaths out of the bag in one story.  

However, Lackberg's appears to be a big pull for tourism!


Fjällbacka - by Bruno Cordioli. CC BY 2.0

CC BY 2.0

New Camilla Läckberg-themed tours will be available from spring 2013, showing fans exactly where many of the fictional scenes took place. For example, Kungsklyftan Gorge – which means ‘The King’s Gorge’ and is named after King Oscar II – where three fictional murder victims were found in The Preacher. There’s also Berit in Järnboden, the local hardware store, which appears in The Stonecutter and The Gallows Bird. Participants can learn about Fjällbacka’s fascinating history, too – including the herring fishing period.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Shoot! We forgot Nevil Shute - Part V

The more one reads about Nevil Shute the more one is fascinated. On the one hand, this author comes out rather bland both as a person and as a writer. No passions run too high. And the reviews keep raving about technical aspects of planes! 

However, there is hardly a reader who has not broached the books and remained immune to their charms. Let us continue our sequential look at Nevil Shute's novels: 


The Seafarers
'The story of a dashing British naval Lieutenant and a Wren who meet right at the end of the Second World War. Their romance is blighted by differences in social background and economic constraints; in unhappiness each turns to odd jobs in boating circles.' - Wikipedia
Shute wrote the first draft of The Seafarers in 1946–47, and rewrote it shortly afterwards, but he apparently put it aside; in 1948 he rewrote it again as Blind Understanding (unpublished), but left that manuscript incomplete. Some of the themes in The Seafarers and Blind Understanding emerged later in Requiem for a Wren, published in 1955

This is another of his books that is not so freely available. There are sites which offer downloads but I am not sure of their credentials. I hope that what I share here will help you decide to take the step of buying the book or choosing to read it some other way. There is, perhaps, a thread running through the works that would make it worth the while to read them all.

A rather comprehensive review highlights another characteristic of Nevil Shute's books 
The joy of purposeful work, to be sure, is fundamental to Shute. It underlies not only his own experience as an engineer- novelist with two careers, but also many of his other books, notably RUINED CITY (1938) and ROUND THE BEND (1951). ON THE BEACH (1957) spotlights the power of purposeful work to give meaning to life even when all human life is coming to an end.THE SEAFARERS is shorter than Shute's published novels. It is uncomplicated by the twists, mysteries, and subplots that enrich his other books. But its simple directness is no defect. Shute gives Jean and Donald, or allows them to give themselves, the only paradise worth having: one joint project after another, in their burgeoning business. They pursue, together, a meaningful life. The dignity of the book eloquently crystallizes the dignity possible to a human being.In THE SEAFARERS, Nevil Shute celebrates the tenacity, intelligence, and drive--in Jean, in Donald, in human nature-- that make possible the world of work.


The Chequer Board  'A dying man looks up three wartime comrades, one of which sees Burma during Japanese occupation and in its independence period after the war. The novel contains an interesting discussion of racism in the US and in the US Army stationed in Britain: British townsfolk prefer the company of black soldiers.'- Wikipedia

Here, at least, you have the Amazon preview -




Now comes one which you can access and read - click on the title - and, what is more, you simply must see the film based on it.

No Highway 'Set in Britain and Canada, an eccentric "boffin" at RAE Farnborough predicts metal fatigue in a new airliner, but is not believed.' - Wikipedia

In a nutshell:
It documents the travails of an eccentric and socially inept scientist who struggles to convince his peers that the newly launched aircraft, popularly known as the ‘Reindeer’ are not safe and could crash dramatically in a matter of minutes on account of destruction of the ‘Tail Wing’ that balances the aircraft.

He is ably backed by his boss, Dr. Scott who is passionate about ensuring customer safety.But undoubtedly it is Honey,the ultimate underdog blessed with a precocious daughter, who is the hero. He even attracts the attractions and amours of two beautiful ladies – the ageing actress, Monica Teasdale, and the young conscientious air hostess, Marjorie Corder.




The best part of this book is that there is a brilliant film based on it. The suspense is excellent and the whole experience is well worth the trouble of finding such an old film. You will thank me for it, I promise.
Based on aircraft engineer Nevil Shute's novel No Highway(the film's UK title), the tight yet sensitive script is by an illustrious trio of writers, all Oscar-nominated for different projects: R.C. Sherriff, Oscar Millard, and Alec Coppel. Judging by the novel's summary on Wikipedia, they made sensible changes to the book's final act by dropping mystical elements.



Once again, we find Nevil Shute mentioned for technical reasons:
Although Shute was a talented engineer whose contributions to aviation include such useful innovations as retractable landing gear, he is more widely known for his literary achievements... Although his first novel, Marazan, was published in 1926 he did not turn to writing full-time until the 1940s, and always thought of himself not as an author but as "an engineer who writes books." Many of his novels drew heavily on Shute's own real-life experiences and engineering knowledge: several of his main characters are aviators or engineers, and he predicted the problems of metal fatigue in No Highway(1948), several years before the fledgling commercial airline industry began to encounter it, and the global horrors of nuclear war in On the Beach (1957).


All in all, it's a case where both book and film charm:
a short book about people who are doing theoretical research into aeroplanes for the British government in the late forties and who discover that there’s a potential problem with a plane that’s recently gone into service. It’s a story about science, and engineering, and people who take both seriously, and that makes it more like SF than anything else—also the actual theory of metal fatigue seems very speculative. (Not to mention wrong.) It’s also a sweet romance, of a very typical Shute kind, a character study, and also a tense thriller about planes crashing, or not crashing.

With James Stewart at his usual charming best, the movie will make a wonderful present, especially combined with the novel or audiobook. Yes, in fact, any Nevil Shute would do nicely for me, thank you very much, all wrapped up in cheerful wrapping paper or not.