No Highway (1948) is 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.
I re-read it on the plane home from Britain. (What can I say; I once watched Titanic on the Swansea-Cork ferry.) I’m not particularly afraid of ships sinking when I’m on them, or planes crashing either—I’m much more likely to die of boredom on a plane than from any other cause. I happened to pick up a copy for a friend while I was there, and when I was putting it into my case I felt an urge to re-read it. I read it over Labrador, where a plane crashes in the book, and this made me smile. I’m so glad we can fly across the Atlantic these days without stopping in Newfoundland to refuel, but I wish we had solicitous stewardesses fussing over our every whim like they used to have!
Nevil Shute was an engineer and an aircraft designer, and it’s clear he knows what he’s talking about when he’s talking about planes and tech—the handwaves when it gets to atomic theory and advances in science are something else. He was an immense bestseller in his day, from the forties to the seventies, but he doesn’t seem to be much read now. I have always loved his books, even the ones that have problems. (Sometimes, but not here, problems with race and class.) They take place in a black and white children’s book world, though they were written for adults. They are pleasantly wholesome. Men are interested in technical problems. People lead largely uneventful lives, though they save the world in little ways all the time. Anyone can fall in love with almost anyone, but falling out of love is much tougher. Making a home is an important thing to do. Characters have integrity, and want to make the world better.
Mr. Honey, the central character of No Highway, is not the narrator. The first person narrator is his boss, who doesn’t quite know what to make of Honey, with his odd obsessions and theories. Honey is an unusual man. He’s fat, middle aged, dyspeptic, out of condition and untidy. He’s described as “a typical boffin,” but he’s worse than that, wearing torn and dirty pyjamas and socks with holes. As well as metal fatigue he’s interested in cosmic rays, moon rockets, the Great Pyramid, automatic writing, and believes that Jesus will return in 1994.
Oddest of all for a hero of a bestseller Honey is a single father—he has a twelve year old daughter who he is raising alone. This is important to the plot, and to him as a character, but it’s taken for granted. The fact that it’s astonishingly unusual in fiction for a main character to be a single father doesn’t seem to have crossed Shute’s mind. (It’s unusual even now, never mind in 1948.) Honey’s wife was killed in 1944 by a V1, eight year old Elspeth survived, and the two of them have been alone for the last four years, not managing very well, but getting along. When Honey is sent to Canada to find the parts of a crashed plane, his ad hoc arrangements for Elspeth come unstuck, and she ends up being cared for by his boss’s wife, a film star, and an air hostess. This domestic story—complete with floor scrubbing and very realistic childhood sickness—runs alongside the plane plot throughout the book.
I have read hundreds of books in which there’s a romance running alongside an action plot—it’s so standard that I don’t even notice it. I can’t think of anything but No Highway where instead there’s a childcare problem. There is a romance, even a romantic triangle, as two women appreciate the unlikely charms of Honey, but it’s pretty much incidental to everything else that’s going on.
This is a quick read and a very enjoyable one—if you’ve never read Shute it’s a good place to start, and if you’ve read his SF and found it odd, it’s a good place to try his mainstream work while keeping the care about technology that makes it feel so unlike most mainstream fiction.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Didn’t know about the book, caught the excellent 1951 film version, No Highway in the Sky, starring Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. (You can see them on the cover of the book.)
I am convinced that part of the reason for the lack of interest in science is the scarcity of good movies about scientists. There used to be lots of them. Too bad this one was wrong about metal fatigue – it worked in the movie.
Shute’s “autobiography”, Slide Rule is worth reading in the context of this book – it concentrates on his life working on aircraft design, though it may go into to much detail about the government-versus-private hoo-ha over the R100 and R101 for some people. I put autobio in inverted commas on account of it not saying anything about his later novel-writing life.
Shute’s metal fatigue theory might have been wrong – it’s years since I read the book, and anyway I don’t know anything techie about metal fatigue – but the book was seen as kind of prescient, as a few years after it came out there were several fatal crashes of the Comet, the first passenger jetliner to see service, and the cause was found to be metal fatigue splitting the fuselage at the (square) window corners. (My father flew later, safer version of the Comet and he used to read Shute’s books).
Ha, was just going to ask if that was Jimmy Stewart on the cover.
Shute does some very nicely understated writing; it’s usually personal lives, rather than civilization-wrecking tragedies, but there’s usually some fun engineering stuff going on in them.
The hard-SF or engineering-SF crowd ought to love them. I’ve got a half-dozen or so Shute paperbacks painfully collected over the years sitting on my “Really good, but I don’t know what to call it” shelf.
I’ve only read one of his, “Trustee from the Toolroom”, which I quite enjoyed a long time ago.
I too love Shute’s work- Round the Bend, A Town Like Alice and On the Beach are regular re-reads for me. I just discovered Trustee, and will add this one to the list.
Oh, nice–I’ll enjoy looking this one up. I’d never heard of it, though A Town Like Alice and On the Beach are on my shelf and I read The Chequer Board years ago.
Andy McNab (pseudonym) – Sean Bean played him in the Bravo Two Zero movie reference to another movie in which Sean Bean played a flawed hero elided out of courtesy to our hostess – has a recurring character Nick Stone who functions as a single if foster father with somewhat odd child care issues.
Interesting to note that the (leading) Comet failure was the result of a production shortcut slipstreamed after initial design and test work – the economy move was mistakenly believed not to change anything that mattered and so not really tested. As first designed it tested just fine and maybe would not have failed.
Doesn’t pay to take changes like that on faith – much testing doesn’t cost it pays.
Wikipedia this date
Shute has a lot of technology driven McGuffins which raise moral concerns like his tale of using what amounts to Greek fire against coastal craft off Bordeaux in a fairly slight tale of WWII.
Some of today’s very successful genre writers – not themselves known as engineers! – use a technique of progressing from somewhat esoteric (to the golden age 14 year old reader) current knowledge and methods to handwaving with a very neatly obscured join.
Mary Arrr: Jimmy Stewart is about the only actor I can imagine being able to do that role. I should check if they have the film in the library.
Nicholas: His theory was wrong but the thing itself was very real, and nobody understood it properly at the time when he was writing. I think that arguably makes the book SF.
Clark: “Greek fire” — oh yes, the one about the rabbits. Not one I read often. Napalm is what I recognised it as, which is again forward thinking and SFnal. And as from progressing that way, yes, I think it’s a fundamentally SFnal thing to do — which is one of the reasons I think SF readers would generally enjoy Shute. His attitude to tech is that it’s nifty and changing, which is so far from the normal mainstream attitude to tech that it makes you see how odd that “normal” is.
Folks might enjoy browsing this mostly picture series:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatpicturegalleries/7926007/Air-travel-the-golden-age-of-the-air-hostess.html
I once gave a lecture to materials engineering students about this book. (Well, also about fatigue properties, how scientific understandings change, engineering ethics, and other related bits.) I don’t own it, and haven’t read it in a few years, and now I want to re-read it.
I love Shute — he had another sf-y book besides On the Beach that is a bit hard to find: it’s an alternate history called In the Wet written just after the war. It’s a bit of a political polemic about socialism and herd-like democracy but I still think it’s worth reading, if only as an interesting period piece.
Another recommended aviation-related work of his is The Rainbow and the Rose about a rescue attempt of a legendary pilot – during a weather-delayed series of rescue attempts, the younger pilot attempting the rescue learns about the older pilot’s tragic romantic past.
And I second others in highly recommending The Trustee From the Toolroom and, of course, my favorite Shute of all time, A Town Like Alice (aka The Legacy).
Lovely little essay that gives a real feel for Shute’s work. I love Shute’s books, reread regularly, and proselytise when I can. (When I had the opportunity to upgrade some recently I put the spare copies on Bookmooch to make sure they got to good homes.)
Particular favourites are Trustee from the Toolroom and A Town Like Alice. The latter has a very sensawunda moment when the Australian hero, seeking his lost love in the UK, says to the lawyer who has just told him someone lives in a hundred miles away, that “Oh, you’ll know him then.”
I want to go and reread this one now…but I can’t because I don’t have a copy. Poot!
I suspect that On the Beach is precisely why SF fans mostly haven’t read Shute. I’ve tried that book, which is the only one I’d ever heard of until I met Jo, twice, and never gotten more than five pages in; it just doesn’t present any sort of surface that interests me. And that’s the one frequently referenced in later SF.
Jo and Marissa both make the ones they’ve talked about sound interesting.
Just finished No Highway- what a wonderful read. I loved the scientist/bureaucrats, not only Mr. Honey and our narrator, but the overall director, who goes into a meeting thinking that Honey is crazy for his free-time research, but arguing that this is the proof that he is a good scientist. “You cannot stop a research man from doing research.”