”I wrote out a bill for $120. He studied it, looked at me, studied it again. Then he unzipped his bag and put wads of notes on my table, fifties, twen”I wrote out a bill for $120. He studied it, looked at me, studied it again. Then he unzipped his bag and put wads of notes on my table, fifties, twenties, perhaps five or six thousand dollars, more, in used notes.
Temptation had run its scarlet fingernails down my scrotum. What did it matter? A success fee, that’s all it was. Merchant bankers took success fees. But I wasn’t a merchant banker. People like that grabbed what they could within the law. In my insignificant way, I represented the law. I was a sworn officer of the court. I was a thread in an ancient fabric that made social existence possible.
I was the law.
Sufficiently psyched up by these thoughts, I leaned across the tailor’s table, plucked two soiled fifties and a twenty, pushed the rest back his way.
‘Lester,’ I said, ‘not all lawyers are the same.’”
I wanted to begin this review with this quote especially for those readers who haven���t met Jack Irish yet. This is the third of four novels that Peter Temple wrote with Irish as the protagonist. There are two seasons of the TV show, and, hopefully, there will be a third of Guy Pierce starring as Jack Irish. There are three standalone movies based on the books also starring Guy Pierce as well. Needless to say, as I read this book, Guy Pierce supplied the face of Jack Irish for me. The quote above really encapsulates who Jack is. The painful honesty, the sense of duty he feels, and the need to believe that any money he makes he earns. He feels vulnerable, as if one more mistake will be his last, but he can’t help keep putting himself out there, trying to be someone standing between those in need and those who take.
He was a high flying lawyer with nothing in front of him but blue skies and a fast escalator to the peaks of his profession, then tragedy struck. His wife was killed by one of his clients, and suddenly, the world did not make sense anymore. He was one of the chosen; there shouldn’t be a fall from grace. After he climbed out of the bottle, he apprenticed to a carpenter, and now he splits his time between “sawin’ and ‘lawin’”.
Jack Irish lives in Melbourne. ”Weather’s okay. I like it, very noir.” The book before this, Black Tide, there was so much of Melbourne in it that I finally pulled up a map of Melbourne so I could follow along with Jack as he moved about the city. I’m reasonably familiar with the streets and alleys of the city without ever having visited. Whenever a writer gets details like this correct it lends an extra layer of authenticity to the plot.
Jack has some horse businessmen friends, AKA gamblers, by the name of Harry Strang and Cameron Delray. They don’t break the rules, but they do bend them a bit. The novel begins with them at the racetrack watching a disaster strike. The only thing that could go wrong to completely bugger them happens. For Jack, it is a chance to achieve some financial stability. To make things even worse, one of their gambling associates is robbed and unnecessarily beaten, brutally.
Mercury, the bloated god of commerce, must be too jaded and knackered to do more than chuckle at the feeble attempts of Jack Irish to put his life back together. Aphrodite has also made him a favorite plaything. His girlfriend leaves him for someone else, and with his mind still whirling, an ex-girlfriend, Linda, blows back into town and wants to shag. She routinely drops into his life like a hurricane and just as quickly blows out with the next tropical storm.
His head isn’t really in the right place to look for a missing person. ”Oh, Lord, why hast thou anointed me the fixer of all things? And why hast thou ordained this in a cold season in which too many things need fixing?” It soon becomes apparent that the person he is looking for may not be the person he thinks he is looking for. He discovers that powerful people are very interested in his investigation. They have secrets, and as Jack gets closer to the truth, people start dying. It doesn’t take a slide rule or a TI-89 calculator to figure out that Jack is the next logical victim. His only safety is finding out the truth before he becomes a missing person. And there isn’t another Jack Irish to come looking for him.
Irish is the fictional protagonist that I’ve met recently who resonates with me the most. For him, living a respectful life is so much more important than acquiring piles and piles of money. He wants to do the right thing by others, despite the ease with which he could take advantage because he is smarter and more skilled. He uses his brains and tenacity to fight against the powerful people in mega-corporations, the equally powerful people who misuse positions of government authority, or on the other end of the spectrum, the local thugs using violence to inspire terror. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”― Edmund Burke. Jack Irish, as flawed as he is, is one of those special people who will step forward out of a crowd and say, enough is enough. He is the type of loyal friend that most of us wish we knew.
I was reading the first Jack Irish novel when I started watching the TV series. The series is not based on the novels, though they stay true to the concepts and ideas that Temple based his books on. The movies are based on the books, so you might want to read the books before venturing into the movies. I feel like watching the series and reading the book at the same time created some good synergy for me and increased my enjoyment of both.
”Charlie once said, elevation of chin, narrowing of eyes revealing that he was about to deliver a message, ‘Jack, make something, you look at it, you’”Charlie once said, elevation of chin, narrowing of eyes revealing that he was about to deliver a message, ‘Jack, make something, you look at it, you’re happy. The work it took, that’s not work.’”
When Jack Irish was drowning himself in whiskey, self pity, and a healthy dose of soul crushing depression, he wandered into Charlie Taub’s workshop and asked for an apprenticeship. Charlie threw him a plank to keep him from drowning, and now, whenever life gets too real, which is a frequent occurrence for Jack, he can always escape to the mingled scents of wood chips and well oiled precision equipment to add some buoyancy to his mental ship.
Jack has enough problems of his own to deal with, but he can’t help getting involved in the plights of others. He used to be a decent lawyer, and he acquires the type of acquaintances who have need of his services. They don’t always pay well, but then money tends to take a back seat to Jack’s natural tenaciousness in finding the truth. Give him a Gordian Knot and he won’t cut it with his sword (Alexander the Great was very impatient), but will unravel the twisty knots until he finds the beginning and the end.
In this case, an old friend of his father shows up and asks him for help in finding his son and the money he loaned him. Jack’s father was a legendary footie player, and there is simply no possible way for Jack to ever live up to his father’s legacy. His father may have given The Fitzroy faithful a lot of pleasure on the field, but Jack gives people hope who have no other avenue to find help. So you might not be surprised to discover that Jack has father issues, unresolvable because his father is dead and nearly sainted by his fans.
What is supposed to be a missing person’s enquiry soon turns into a grand conspiracy that involves one of the richest men in Australia (seriously no one gets this rich without bending, breaking, and obliterating rules) and a series of subsidiary companies that lead Jack on a merry chase to not only find Gary but also find out why Gary is hiding or even if Gary is still alive. It soon becomes apparent that one unarmed lawyer is hardly the proper investigator for what becomes a battle between contending forces that involve bullets instead of legal paperwork.
On top of all this, his love life is a shambles. His girlfriend runs off to Sydney to take a new job and finds a new lover as well. Things are not going well with his friend and frequent employer Harry Strang at the horse racing track. Cam, the enforcer and legman for Harry, proves invaluable as always in showing up just when Jack needs him most. His talents are immeasurable. And all of this is taking too much time because he still has those tables he needs to finish for Charlie.
Whew!
This is a complicated book, but less so if you read the first book Bad Debts and, in my case, have watched most of the Tv series. What I appreciate about this book is that Peter Temple expects his readers to not only pay attention but also to be smart enough to be able to handle juggling several plot elements at once. If you do become momentarily confused, grab a sizzling shrimp off the barbie and pop the top of a Victoria Bitter. Read on; it will all become clear.
The cast of characters are fantastic. Jack is a fully formed character whom I feel I know as well as people I’ve known for twenty years. The Australian colloquialisms come fast and furious, and by the end of the book, you might even risk having acquired the downunder accent. After two Jack Irish books, I feel like I can find my way around Melbourne like a native. Temple takes us down to street level, into the pubs, restaurants, and more than a few dank alleys.
Jack Irish, without a doubt, has been my favorite find of the year.
”First on the scene, the flies swarmed contentedly in the heat as the blood pooled black over tiles and carpet. Outside, washing hung still on the rot”First on the scene, the flies swarmed contentedly in the heat as the blood pooled black over tiles and carpet. Outside, washing hung still on the rotary line, bone dry and stiff from the sun. A child's scooter lay abandoned on the stepping stone path. Just one human heart beat within a kilometer radius of the farm. So nothing reacted when deep inside the house, the baby started crying…”
Aaron Falk returns to his home town of Kiewarra after a twenty year absence to attend the funeral of Luke Hadler, his best friend from school. Unfortunately, he is also attending the funerals of Luke’s wife and his little boy.
Something has gone very wrong on the Hadler farm.
Kiewarra has been in the middle of a crippling drought, and without water, what were once vibrant green fields with frolicking livestock are now fifty shades of brown. ”The huge river was nothing more than a dusty scar in the land. The empty bed stretched long and barren in either direction, its serpentine curves tracing the path where the water had flowed. The hollow that had been carved over centuries was now a cracked patchwork of rocks and crabgrass. Along the banks, gnarled gray tree roots were exposed like cobwebs. It was appalling.”
Living in conditions like this can make a man think that the only reasonable solution to obliviate despair is to turn his shotgun on his family and then on himself.
Aaron has been out of touch with Luke in recent years. Twenty years ago, his father had packed up a few of their belongings and moved to Melbourne, a city big enough that they could begin new lives. In Kiewarra, everyone knows everything about everyone or at least think they do. If there are blanks in what they know, they tend to fill those in with their own speculation. When a girl died and there was circumstantial evidence to implicate Falk, the town decided he was guilty. So when Aaron’s dad packed up and left, it was to escape the relentless persecution that had nothing to do with law and order.
It doesn’t take long for Aaron to discover that memories are long in a small town and forgiveness is unattainable. Rooms go quiet when he enters, and store workers refuse to serve him. Efforts only escalate from there to convince him to leave town...as soon as possible, but Luke’s dad has asked him to look into the deaths. The more he investigates the more he realizes that what is presumed to have happened might have no relation to the truth. A deja vu moment for a man who has been haunted by condemnation from twenty years ago. He has his own guilt, not being the friend he should have been to a girl who was on the verge of cracking up. ”She felt an urge to explain herself but couldn’t think of the words. Instead, she wanted to take his face in her hands, kiss him again, and tell him he had done everything he could.”
Threaded through Aaron’s investigation of Luke’s death is also the echoing twenty year old question...who killed Ellie Deacon? Can Aaron stand to be in Kiewarra long enough to unravel the truth?
This book won many prizes. It has been lauded by readers from every country on every continent. There were publisher bidding wars for the right to publish. Jane Harper was living one of those writer dreams that usually just stays a wet dream. For me, this was just an airplane spinner rack read, something that would divert me for a few hours on a long flight. The plot was okay, nothing too twisty or too clever. The characterizations were pretty vanilla. I want to know a bit more about people than just what they do while caught up in thrilling circumstances. I had someone mention to me once that readers prefer lead characters that aren’t too interesting because they can better see themselves as that character. WTF? That can’t be true, but after seeing all the glowing reviews for this book, I do wonder.
The most positive part of reading this book is that Harper created a lot of great atmosphere with her descriptions of the drought. I’ve lived through drought, and she gave me flashbacks to times in my life where scanning the horizon for any sign of rain was almost pathological.
The book feels hyper edited. She gives credit to the many people in the back of the book who helped bring this book to print, and it shows the signs of numerous editors. The writing style, as a result, is smooth and makes for easy reading, though it does make me wonder what I will remember about this book in a few months. Where is the author? Buried under suggested corrections?
This book is set in Australia, but, except for a few uses of the word “mate,” this book could have been set in America or somewhere else equally bland. I recently read Bad Debts by Peter Temple, which is set in Melbourne, just down the road from where this book was set, and the authenticity of the use of Australian slang made it a pure pleasure to read. I did have to google words once in a while, but that just added more flavor to the barramundi. Do they have Australian slang filters? Because if they do, this book was strained many times. The author spent a significant amount of time in England, and one wonders, even when she was in Australia, did she really LIVE Australia?
I read books set in foreign climates to immerse myself in a foreign experience.
The book fell short of my expectations, but for all that, as long as I see it for what it really is...a diversion...it is compelling enough to accomplish that task.
”I caught her scent as I took the coat and jacket. It was, in a word, throaty.
‘This is nice,’ she said, looking around.
We stood awkwardly for a moment”I caught her scent as I took the coat and jacket. It was, in a word, throaty.
‘This is nice,’ she said, looking around.
We stood awkwardly for a moment, something trembling in the air between us. I looked around at the books in piles on every surface, the CDs and tapes everywhere, the unhung pictures, seeing the place for the first time in years.
‘It’s sort of gentlemen’s club mates with undergraduate student digs,’ she said.”
Jack Irish was once a high rising, reasonably successful lawyer when tragedy strikes. What this woman caller sees in Jack’s flat are the results of a quick spiral downward. Although I must say the description sort of sounds like a mini-paradise to me. I’ve had apartments that resembled that ensemble.
Jack is still a lawyer, but barely. He helps a man named Harry Strang with some shady horse dealings. He helps with loan shark collections. He helps people find people, but he is not a private investigator, though as the story goes, you’ll be wondering why he doesn’t just apply for his licensing and make it official.
As part of his self-therapy, once he pulled his head out of the bottle, he starts hanging out at the local woodworking shop. Charlie isn’t too keen on acquiring an apprentice, but Irish keeps coming around, and before too long, Charlie can’t help himself from showing Irish how things are done. I’ve done some woodworking in my past. I’ve built cedar chests, cabinets, bookshelves, and desks. Doing something with your hands is unbelievably cathartic. I put words on pages every day, and even though that is satisfying, sometimes I just need to go outside to muck in the garden or pull some old boards from the rafters and see if I can conceive of something to make with them. Seeing something tangible, built with your own hands, is so satisfying. The woodworking nuances threaded into the plot add some depth to the character of Irish that make my developing relationship with him that much stronger.
Irish has finally made it to a level of competence that Charlie is trusting him with a special order, though Jack is finding it difficult to make something this beautiful that won’t be revered in someone’s home.
”I studied the rough walnut boards with reverence. This was one of the classic furniture timbers. Very few makers ever had the chance to work with wood of this quality and size.
Did an emerging mining company deserve a table made from unobtainable timber air-dried for at least fifty years?
I loved Charlie’s response: ”’This arschloch I’m not making it for,’ he said. ‘He’s just the first owner. I’m making it for all the owners.’”
The trouble begins with a message left by an ex-client Danny McKillop. The name doesn’t ring any bells for Jack. He attempts to get in touch, but they keep missing one another. When McKillop ends up dead, Jack’s curiosity is aroused. As he starts to resurrect McKillop’s recent and more distant past, some of Jack’s memories regarding Danny’s case starts to resurface. It wasn’t the best time in Jack’s life to have him as your attorney. He was self-abusing himself at an alarming rate over the death of his wife. When you read the book and find out exactly how she died, you’ll have even more understanding of his state of mind. ”I wasn’t walking around drunk, crying in pubs, getting into fights with strangers because I was blaming myself. I was in a state of incoherent rage. I had lost someone who had cast a glow into every corner of my life. I was entitled to my feelings. Loss. Hate. Hopelessness. Worthlessness.” The more Irish peers into the past the more he starts to realize that things were missed in the McKillop case. There were greater forces at work than he or even Danny were aware.
As Jack pokes and prods about, he soon discovers that the strings connecting to the case lead all the way to Parliament. Even if he wants to back off, he is already in too deep.
The series is set in Melbourne, Australia. I was reading about Jack going here and there, and so finally, I pulled up a map of Melbourne. I spent a bit of time familiarizing myself with the layout of the streets. By the end of the book, I wasn’t having to look at the map anymore but could visualize where Jack was in the city. There is some Australian slang scattered throughout the book. Some are familiar to me, and some are self-evident, but there are a few I had to google to be sure they are what I think they are. I know things like this annoy some readers, but for me, all it does is add authenticity to my reading experience.
There is a Jack Irish series available, starring Guy Pearce, which has two seasons. In addition, there are three movies that precede the series, also starring Guy Pearce, that are based on the novels. There are only four Jack Irish novels, which is too few for sure, but unfortunately, Peter Temple passed away in 2018. I have not seen the movies yet because I decided to read the books first. I am watching the first season of the series, and it is terrific so far. Guy Pearce has always been one of my favorite actors, and the role fits him like a glove. So you have many choices about how you want to get to know Jack Irish, but whichever way you choose, I highly recommend making his acquaintance.
”An example of presumed lack of models is provided by the U.S. today, for which belief in American exceptionalism translates into the widespread belie”An example of presumed lack of models is provided by the U.S. today, for which belief in American exceptionalism translates into the widespread belief that the U.S. has nothing to learn from Canada and Western European democracies: not even from their solutions to issues that arise for every country, such as health care, education, immigration, prisons, and security in old age--issues about which most Americans are dissatisfied with our American solutions but still refuse to learn from Canadian or Western European solutions.”
It has been a source of frustration for me that Americans have developed so many prejudices against Europe and even their North American partnerships. We do so believe in our exceptionalism that we refuse to recognize that someone else somewhere else knows how to do something better than we do. When I read about the Roman Empire, one of their strengths, that always impressed me and helped them become the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, until the United States, was their ability to recognize and assimilate good ideas from other cultures. They assimilated the very best from every culture they encountered.
As Jared Diamond points out, look at how many of the United States’ winners of Nobel Prizes were immigrants or first generation descendents from immigrants. The US may have provided the catalyst for those exceptional people to reach their full potential, but the synergy of bringing people together from different cultures,with different eyes, with different experiences, leads to amazing breakthroughs in science, economics, literature, art, etc. So is American exceptionalism really based on American ingenuity, or is it based upon the synergy of all those fatherlands/motherlands contributing to the melting pot of what makes us Americans?
What are immigrants good for? Well, it seems to me like they are essential in keeping America exceptional.
What Diamond is doing in this book is encouraging all of us to expand our view of the world and see the exceptionalism and the miscalculations that have occurred around the world in moments of crisis. He has selected 7 nations for which he has developed a particular fondness, and all of them are places he has spent a significant amount of time visiting or living in. The seven finalists for the Diamond round of analysis are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.
I am surprised that he did not include an African country. He does talk about the population explosion in Kenya, 4% growth, but he uses it in such a way that changes my perception of how to analyze population growth. Yes, of course, it is in the best interest of Kenya to lower their reproductive rates. There are currently 50 million Kenyans and 330 million Americans. Guess how many Kenyans it takes to equal the consumption of ONE American.
32
Thank goodness, the population growth of the US is nearly flat because, really, how many more Americans can we afford? For that matter, the ratio is way skewed between any first world country and any country in Africa. I feel that lowering our footprint is a duty for all of us.
The goal of the book is to analyze these countries at moments of crisis and weigh the successfulness of the decisions that were made to attempt to avert disaster.
I am pleasantly surprised that Diamond chose Finland because I know next to nothing about the history of Finland and certainly had no clear understanding of the complicated relationship they have had with Russia. In 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland. There is a strip of land between Russia and Finland that has geographical significance for both countries. Interestingly enough, Finland had alliances with Britain, France, and Sweden and fully hoped those nations would come to their aid.
They did not.
It was a true David and Goliath situation. The population of Finland was 3,700,000, compared to the Soviet Union’s 170 million. Now the allies were busy with a war with Germany, but still you have to think that they were looking at the mismatch of that situation and realizing that the war was over before it ever began.
They were wrong.
The Soviets threw everything at the Finns. They had modern tanks, planes, and artillery, which were nearly nonexistent for the Finns. They had 500,000 troops to use as just the first wave. It should have been over before it ever began.
One of the Finnish secret weapons turned out to be skis.
The Finns brought the Soviet advance to a screeching halt with courage, ingenuity, and superb leadership. I’d love to tell you more about how they accomplished it, but you really need to read the Diamond assessment. I will say, equally impressive has been the way that Finland has positioned itself between the West and the Russians to make it more advantageous for the Russians to let them continue to exist as a sovereign nation, rather than attempting once again to conquer and control them.
Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1853, changing the trajectory of Japanese history forever. As Diamond weighs the evolution of Japan in world events, you will see that they had moments of brilliant decision making and some very bad ones when hubris outweighed intellect.
A coup in Chile, in 1973, led to the systematic murder of thousands of leftist leaning Chileans. Augusto Pinochet, the mild mannered, religious, psychopath who orchestrated this coup, stayed in power, of some sort, clear up to 2002. He was never prosecuted for his crimes. In fact, the Chilean economy eventually prospered because of some of the decisions he made as dictator. Diamond will sort through the blood and economic boom to analyze the Pinochet decisions that worked and those that led to genocide.
Diamond discusses the particularly unique issues that happen when a country is an island nation, like Indonesia. How do you coalesce all these isolated island cultures into one sense of nationality?
There is a lot to unpack in the recent history of Germany, and Diamond breaks down the disasters, as well as the moments of resilience, that have led Germany back to the forefront of successful nations.
I’ve always heard that Australia is desperate to increase its population. Diamond breaks down the benefits and potential pitfalls of a liberal immigration policy to increase population. When you look at the successes of small nations, like Finland, who enjoy a very high standard of living from the top to the bottom of their societies, is a larger population really the key to greater productivity?
Of course, Diamond devotes the most chapters to the United States. There are still a lot of wonderful things about being an American, and Diamond is unexpectedly hopeful that the US will begin to focus on the more important problems facing Americans, such as health care, education, our outrageously large prison system, immigration, and shoring up a system to insure comfortable retirements for our elderly. Solutions are all within our grasp, and many of them already exist with other friendly nations abroad, and even some solutions might rest with those nations right on our own doorstep. I do want us to, in fact, think more like the Romans and recognize good ideas wherever they might blossom into existence and not be afraid to apply them for the greater good of our society simply because they originated elsewhere. We need to embrace the fact that our exceptionalism isn’t the definition of being an American, but that we are an immigrant nation that provides a haven for exceptionalism from all over the world.
You may not always agree with Diamond. Believe me, he is used to dissenting opinions. He even discusses the lack of manners and civil discourse, especially online, that might eventually prove as detrimental to our society as anything else we face. It is hard to reach reasonable conclusions when you presume the people who disagree with you are inherently evil. Diamond, as always, gives me much to ponder. Highly Recommended!
I would like to thank Little, Brown for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.
”I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these ”I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.”
[image]
There was a 1981 mini-series starring Bryan Brown and Helen Morse.
Our narrator is a solicitor by the name of Noel Strachan who is ”as solid as the Bank of England, and as sticky as treacle.” He becomes involved with an estate that seems to be a straightforward affair, but soon it evolves into his most all consuming case.
It involves a woman named Jean Paget, to him more of a girl, but as we learn her story, we find out just how much of a woman she really is.
Paget’s story is based on true events. This story is set in Malaya, but the real story is set in Sumatra. The women and children taken by the Japanese during the war are Dutch, not British, and Nevil Shute gets many things wrong. Some of that is translation problems, and some of those are changes necessary to tell the story he wants to tell. The Japanese take all foreign nationals in Malaya prisoner. They separate the men from the women, haul the men off to camps, and don’t have a clue what to with the women and children.
So they march them in what turns out to be random directions towards mythical camps for women and children that never materialize. With every brutal mile, their ranks are thinned, and the youngest woman among them becomes their de facto leader.
Jean Paget.
She befriends a truck driver from the Australian outback, Jim Harman, who steals much needed supplies at great risk. Eventually, he is caught.
”’I stole those mucking chickens and I gave them to her. So what?’ said Joe.
The ’So what?’ turns out to be a very big deal indeed.
”’They crucified him,’ she said quietly. ‘They took us down to Kuantan, and they nailed his hands to a tree, and beat him to death. They kept us there, and made us look on while they did it.’”
This is a story that Paget tells to Noel Strachan, and he shares the story with us. Over the course of the novel, she continues to write to him about her life. Despite the age difference and the impracticality of a relationship, it is easy to see that Strachan has fallen in love with Jean Paget, and as it turned out, so did Joe Harman.
Joe Harman is based on a real man by the name of Herbert James ‘Ringer’ Edwards. He was every inch the man that Shute describes in his novel.
In this edition, there is a wonderful afterword by Jenny Colgan. She makes the case that writers, craftsmen and craftswomen, like Nevil Shute, Bernard Malamud, Elizabeth Taylor, Robertson Davies are largely forgotten by the reading community today. Interestingly enough, I have several books by all these writers in my personal library. I am the consummate pursuer of writers, exactly like Shute, who have been relegated to the past, left for dead, but who are in need of a resurrection with a new generation of readers. He has certainly left his mark on me. I think about Shute’s book On the Beach at least once a week. It is one of my favorite post-apocalyptic books. I have a feeling I will be similarly haunted by A Town Like Alice.
Nevil Shute Norway is his full name. To keep his engineering life and his writing life separated, he existed under Norway in one and Shute in the other. He became caught up in the disastrous airship craze between the world wars, and he is brought to life so vividly by David Dennington in his historical novel The Airshipmen.
Shute’s writing style is crisp, concise, and straightforward. There is romance, but he presents it in such a practical fashion that the plot never bogs down in the melodrama of star crossed lovers. ”But Shute was a storytelling craftsman to his bones; an aeronautics obsessive-- there are very few authors who are also excellent engineers. He never constructs a lazy or shoddy sentence, any more than he’d have let the wings fall off one of his aeroplanes.”
After receiving her legacy, Jean ends up in the outback of Australia, being exactly the can-do woman she was in Malaya. She wants to build the sparse few buildings of Willstown into the next Alice Springs. I find this part of the story so inspiring. She is such an natural entrepreneur. She asks the right questions. What do people need? What do people want that they don’t even know they want it yet? What must we do to make each venture profitable? How does she keep the young women from running off to the big cities? No young women means there are no young men. In many ways, she is like Bugsy Siegel who envisioned casinos in the desert. She wants to build A Town Like Alice.
She uses her legacy to build something.
There is one major plot twist which is dangled so masterfully by Shute, but the reveal is not a grand fireworks affair. That just isn’t Shute’s style. He brings it in subtly, as if to say,...of course, this is what really happened.
Poor Noel Strachan meets the girl of his dreams forty years too late, but fate does at least let him meet her. You, too, can meet Jean Paget and Joe Harman and get to know what poddy-dodging means and ringers, but more importantly, if you love a good story as well crafted as the airplanes you trust your life to, then you should be reading Nevil Shute. His books should not be forgotten. Blow the dust off them in your local library and paperback exchanges, and let his stories live in your mind as they do in mine.
Loading...
