Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice (1950)

[oursin]

I have been vaguely thinking about rereading/reading some Nevil Shute following recs by Jo Walton at her tor.com blog, since our tastes have a good deal of overlap.

Anyway, I picked this up in the Oxfam shop last week. I first read it (in an abridged/expurgated schools edition, and then the full thing from the local library) when I was about 13. My general associations were that it would be the sort of read I am looking for in the interim of the academic research stuff.

Ummm.

I found the style much clunkier than I recalled, and I was rather maddened by the narrative framing device that the story is actually being told by the elderly lawyer who looks after Jean Paget's inheritance from her eccentric misogynist uncle, because even if she was writing him long letters and having long conversations on the occasions when they met, I do think there are things there which he could not possibly have known and she was really unlikely to tell him, and I wondered about why that decision on how to tell the story. (It's sort of a riff from the clubland narrative thing, I suppose?)

When I was 13 I probably did not notice, or was generally habituated to, the pervasive and unthinking racist assumptions. Shute appears to have been a humane racist, but the language is sometimes deeply uncomfortable. Yes, I know that this probably accurately reflected the way people c. 1950 would have spoken and thought.

I also increasingly felt that if a woman had written this there would be accusations of Mary Sue about the heroine, though possibly I give Shute something of a pass for writing what was probably intended as a female version of The Competent Man.

However, what I found problematic was the recurrence of something that was only in one instance literally 'What these people need is a honky', but certainly had significant similarities in Jean's odyssey.

Nearly all the other women who are being harried from pillar to post across Malaya by the Japanese are depicted as fairly dim and incompetent and the general sense is that if Jean hadn't been among them they would all have lain down and died, pretty much.

And it takes her going to Willstown to turn it from deadendsville to a flourishing town.

(Oh boy, the colonialist/imperialist narrative going on there.)

Even the Australians of the outback are depicted in a really rather condescending way, as rough, simple, yet largely kindly folk with narrow notions of gender roles. (And I would really like a more expert take on how Shute writes characters talking Strine: it makes me cringe - but perhaps this is a post-Bazza Mackenzie reaction?)

Oh yes, and nobody seems to have heard of contraceptives!

Although this was republished in 2000 by House of Stratus (and I will concede that Shute's attitudes probably constitute a pinnacle of enlightenment compared to some other of their revived authors, e.g. Dornford Yates), it's largely a period piece, I think.

Comments

[rosinarowantree.livejournal.com]

I agree about Dornford Yates - but was he worse than Sapper, for example, whose books I haven't read since I was a teenager. It was the casual, throwaway racism I found startling - not the stereotyping of other races and nationalities (even the French - probably the Scots, West and Cornish too), which I remembered, but even when neutral in plot terms, the language was offensive.

One of Nevil Shute's books I remember - but I haven't read it probably in forty years, so details are light - was "The Seventh Vote" where people had multiple votes in general elections depending on how 'worthy' they were of guiding their country. I know education and qualifications came into it - I suspect that wealth, land-owning, and families did too. The Seventh Vote was for personal service to the Royal Family. There is something both appealing and repellent about this ... though I'm not sure if it would be more likely under a right-wing or a left-wing state (replacing Royal Family with Head of State, as appropriate of course).

[legionseagle]

The book you reference is the one I know as In The Wet (did it get published under a different title?) and I was just going to comment to say, "'In the Wet' is not a Nevil Shute book to read lightly, especially not if you feel A Town Like Alice has Issues which are more like Bound Volumes stretching over several shelves." Quite apart from the racial issues (one character's future avatar's middle name/nickname is 'Nigger') there's the imagined dystopian 1983 (the plot concerns the future avatar essentially saving the Royal Family from Clement Atlee).

[oursin]

I am now imagining a Shute/Angela Thirkell collaboration - be afraid. Be very afraid.

[rosinarowantree.livejournal.com]

Ah - I didn't know about its other title (or I've remembered the name wrongly - the Seventh Vote was definitely a major plot point). I remember being repelled at the ideas, though I did have a fairly thick and insensitive hide in those days (still do, in some ways ...)

[legionseagle]

The stuff about the Seventh Vote reminded me of Kipling's The Army of a Dream and similarly left me with a profound desire for a bath.

[oursin]

As Dr Johnson said of two minor C18th poets:
'There is no disputing precedency betwixt a louse and a flea'
and that is pretty much what I feel about Sapper and Yates. I suppose Sapper, or at least Bulldog Drummond, is more of a thug.

[rosinarowantree.livejournal.com]

I loved Dornford Yates - the Berry books and the Mansel series - while I was still at school. Drummond was indeed more of a thug, but nowadays I am amazed at the idea of gentlemen like Jonathan Mansel driving round Europe in their Rolls Royces, with a tool box equipped with a rope and a spade, in case they wish to execute some criminal that annoys them ...

Not to mention Sax Rohmer, and various other books that I read then, which shock me now.

[oursin]

I was always more of a Buchan fan myself. Who in spite of Blenkiron's horrid diatribe in Greenmantle is largely rather more acceptable in his opinions.

[mme_hardy]

I loved Sax Rohmer, and wish there were something similarly gaudy that I could still read. Or that there were more A. Merrit books.

[whatistigerbalm]

This is my mother-in-law's favourite book. I have not read it but nothing in this review surprises me.

[oursin]

It does, I suppose, have some good points about a woman with agency who makes things happen by working through persuasion and subtlety and strategising and so on (which I can normally want to see a lot more of), but this is so embedded in the context of most other people being a bit passive and pathetic and resigned, unless they are vicious Japanese officers, quite apart from the racism, that it icked me a bit.

[adrian_turtle]

I know this book as _Legacy_ and it used to be one of my favorites. Several of Nevil Shute's books have resonant title, with double meaning ("Legacy," or "Kindling") that Shute himself didn't like, and a superficial title ("A Town Like Alice" or "Ruined City") that Shute preferred. I love straightforward engineers, so my eyes roll in an affectionate way, yet they roll nonetheless. At least he didn't put more trivial titles on "Round the Bend" or "The Chequer Board."

There was a thing about the beginning of the book I didn't notice in my first dozen or so readings in the 1970s and '80s. (Some girls go for Anne Shirley, ok? I liked Jean.) It was painfully obvious on rereading a couple of years ago, when the US was starting to talk about health care reform. One of the big reasons Jean is unhappy in Britain is that her Britain is a fundamentally bad place--regulations are stifling freedom, the welfare state destroys people's pride so they starve to death, and national health care means respectable sick people (like Jean's elderly relative) die of being embarrassed to go to a public clinic. This isn't just Jean's attitude. The narrator, and Shute, clearly agree.

They seem to think Australia is bright and beautiful, without food rationing or cities full of rubble, because the Australian poor are free to starve. The notoriously rainy British climate, with its long winters, and the blockades and bombing of the recent war, don't seem to matter. Jean wants to go to a decent place, with nice clear class differences. I'm really glad the Tea Party hasn't seemed to notice Shute.

[oursin]

To the best of my knowledge Australia did have a welfare state (at least if you were white) at the time in question! however, I can also imagine that there were problems of provision of e.g. health care to the remote outback.

[rosinarowantree.livejournal.com]

"Flying Doctor to Wollumboola Base, come in please!"

Was the Flying Doctor service private? I can't remember any reference to payment.

[oursin]

I think there was some mention in the novel of paying into a pool for the Flying Doctor service, but it wasn't much.

[gillo]

I loved Shute for a year or so when I was about twelve; the Dornford Yates period was a year or two later. In my teens I read voraciously, and once I found an author I read everything I could get my hands on.

Then, in the 80s, I was teaching in a girls' school in Hampton, and the (abridged) version was one of the options to use with twelve-year-olds. Remembering how I'd loved it, I embarked on the book as a class text.

I was shaken. Where had all this racism come from? The narrator, far from being the kindly Scots gentleman of my memory was bigoted, judgemental, racist himself. There was gratuitous cruelty - a sort of pornographic dwelling on the atrocities of the Japanese - and sexism as well as racism. And that was even without much of the Australian experience, which was severely cut in the abridged Windmill publication we used.

The only sane approach was to use it as a springboard for discussion of the Issues - which Shute had no idea he was raising. Why was he so popular? How has our interpretation changed? Above all, the racism. This was a multi-ethnic classroom.

I was never more glad to finish a book and have never touched it since. And even so, what sticks in my mind is the casual advice to Jean to have a separate section of her ice-cream parlour for the Aborigines because they would feel more comfortable that way.

Even recalling it makes me feel a bit soiled. I loved the book whan I was young - and it was approved of by my parents and teachers.

I don't think I dare ever re-read Yates or Buchan either. Mind you, I re-read The Coral Island a few years ago, before teaching Lord of the Flies for GCSE. Now there's a mass of imperialism, racism and unexamined privilege if you like.

[oursin]

I think that must have been the edition I read at school.

I think we were meant to think 'yay Jean' for even thinking about serving ice-cream to the Aborigines. (Am reminded of episode that I vaguely recall from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe - lent to me by a friend - in which the owners of the cafe are threatened by the Klan because they serve their barbecue to the local black population at the back door of the cafe.)

Much tempted to go through with a little bottle of white-out fluid for every time Joe uses that term of endearment, because there is only so much shuddering one can do.

There was certainly something of a subtext that most women probably should have their inheritance held in trust until they are practically menopausal (isn't the only other women with anything like a spine the elderly one who stands up to the Japanese officer and gets beaten up for her pains? - oh yes, and middle-aged Aggie who comes to run the workroom and is a tough cookie) but Jean is different.