BOOK REVIEW: SHUTE: THE ENGINEER WHO BECAME A PRINCE OF STORYTELLERS by Richard Thorn. Five Stars.
One hundred years ago this month Airship R38/ZR-2 plunged into the River Humber, killing 16 American and 28 British airshipmen. That event affected designers of the next generation of airships significantly. One such man was Nevil Shute. I got interested in the great dirigibles in my youth. Naturally, this book appealed to me. Nevil Shute, never afraid to tell it the way he saw it, was highly critical of the designers of R38/ZR-2 and then later of R101. His opinions on many subjects ruffled more than a few feathers and Richard Thorn goes into this aspect of his personality in detail.
I was sorry when this book ended, so I knew it was an excellent read. Nevil Shute’s stories fascinated me from being a teenager—especially his book Slide Rule, which told of his time growing up in England and playing truant to avoid his tormentors at school—he possessed a bad stutter. And then his time in Dublin, Ireland, when is father was the postmaster and where ‘the Troubles’ suddenly erupted on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. On that violent day the young Shute bravely acted as a stretcher bearer. He was seventeen.
Then he moved on to study engineering at Oxford, later joining the De Havilland Aircraft Co as an aeronautical engineer building aeroplanes. This led to him joining Barnes Wallis as his No 2 man at Vickers building and flying Airship R101’s nemesis, R100. When all that literally blew up, (well R101 did, R100 was smashed up in her shed on government’s orders), Shute built his own aircraft company, which grew so big and successful that the board fired him. This is not uncommon apparently, clever people can only take a company so far. After that period, he went to work for the government, developing special weapons for use in WW2.
Richard Thorn did a great job with this biography. His writing style is pleasing. There was much I learned about Nevil Shute Norway that I did not know. I’d done a lot of research on him and written about him. He was much tougher than I thought—formidable indeed! But then, he would have had to have been, bearing in mind all he’d achieved. He was no shrinking violet. Anyone who flies a plane from England to Australia with only a few hours under his belt and with a copilot (I should say co-traveler) who could not fly or navigate a plane, could not have been a shrinking violet—pretty crazy perhaps! But not that.
Shute was always thinking ‘outside the box’, his topics original and fresh, controversial. Aside from love, aviation and sailing, he brought into his stories, politics, race, religion, spirituality and war, from every corner of the globe. His work was cinematic and easily translated in movies—and many were. His books were often snapped up by film companies even before they hit the book racks.
Richard Thorn tells us more of Shute’s time in Australia where a whole new, important chapter of his life began—a chapter I was not familiar with. Thorn also gives us real insight into where the ideas for each story came from as well as progress, writing and publishing of each book.
A great read, one I’d thoroughly recommend.
David Dennington, Author of The Airshipmen Trilogy and The Ghost of Captain Hinchliffe.
I was sorry when this book ended, so I knew it was an excellent read. Nevil Shute’s stories fascinated me from being a teenager—especially his book Slide Rule, which told of his time growing up in England and playing truant to avoid his tormentors at school—he possessed a bad stutter. And then his time in Dublin, Ireland, when is father was the postmaster and where ‘the Troubles’ suddenly erupted on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. On that violent day the young Shute bravely acted as a stretcher bearer. He was seventeen.
Then he moved on to study engineering at Oxford, later joining the De Havilland Aircraft Co as an aeronautical engineer building aeroplanes. This led to him joining Barnes Wallis as his No 2 man at Vickers building and flying Airship R101’s nemesis, R100. When all that literally blew up, (well R101 did, R100 was smashed up in her shed on government’s orders), Shute built his own aircraft company, which grew so big and successful that the board fired him. This is not uncommon apparently, clever people can only take a company so far. After that period, he went to work for the government, developing special weapons for use in WW2.
Richard Thorn did a great job with this biography. His writing style is pleasing. There was much I learned about Nevil Shute Norway that I did not know. I’d done a lot of research on him and written about him. He was much tougher than I thought—formidable indeed! But then, he would have had to have been, bearing in mind all he’d achieved. He was no shrinking violet. Anyone who flies a plane from England to Australia with only a few hours under his belt and with a copilot (I should say co-traveler) who could not fly or navigate a plane, could not have been a shrinking violet—pretty crazy perhaps! But not that.
Shute was always thinking ‘outside the box’, his topics original and fresh, controversial. Aside from love, aviation and sailing, he brought into his stories, politics, race, religion, spirituality and war, from every corner of the globe. His work was cinematic and easily translated in movies—and many were. His books were often snapped up by film companies even before they hit the book racks.
Richard Thorn tells us more of Shute’s time in Australia where a whole new, important chapter of his life began—a chapter I was not familiar with. Thorn also gives us real insight into where the ideas for each story came from as well as progress, writing and publishing of each book.
A great read, one I’d thoroughly recommend.
David Dennington, Author of The Airshipmen Trilogy and The Ghost of Captain Hinchliffe.
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