Biographies
1 September 2020 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI'm currently reading "Slide Rule" and "A Long Walk to Freedom" in tandem (I really can't remember how that happened).
Nevil Shute's politics may not be as sainted in retrospect as Nelson Mandela's, but I'm afraid he's a *far* better writer of autobiography. Being a professional story-teller almost certainly helps there.
Mandela somehow manages to come across as pretty unsympathetic in his own telling, with an air of constantly making excuses and having much to make them for (e.g. overusing phrases like "a freedom fighter has to..." which simultaneously elevate himself and defend his conduct), and he fails to make the tortuous politics of his era interesting. It's difficult to write about committee meetings (even underground prohibited ones) and internal policy disputes, and enthuse the audience thereby, and unmemorable names and sets of initials fly past.
The most involving part of the book is his account of the lost tribal world of his childhood, where he takes it for granted that he was the son of a junior wife with her own compound to which the husband would pay occasional conjugal visits, for example. As soon as he comes to believe that everyone has to forget their individual tribes and become pan-Africans (with nothing in common but the colour of their skin and a mutual grievance), and looks back on his home with the disdain of a city sophisticate regarding the unenlightened masses (and of a revolutionary who speaks in the name of 'the people', then gets annoyed by their stubborn lack of revolutionary spirit), he becomes an unintentionally unsympathetic protagonist.
At least, that's my attempt at analysing why I'm not liking the book very much...
It's interesting reading the Shute biography shortly after having read his two early 'suppressed' novels, of which he is very dismissive in "Slide Rule". It's evident there was clearly a fair degree of autobiographical experience in "Stephen Morris" and its semi-sequel, from the early days of the de Havilland company to the South Coast sailing which features so vividly at the start of the second book; the author claims that "I doubt very much, if any, of it was written twice", which is very likely the case for a first novel, but the result is not noticeably any worse than his early published books, save perhaps in the rather conventional handling of the romance.
It was a bit of a shock to make the connection between his father having been posted to Ireland as the civil servant in charge of the Post Office there during the Edwardian era, and the Easter uprising in Dublin, which took place in the actual building where his father's offices were located (and in which he would have been present at the time, had he not by chance been called away an hour earlier). And Shute writes vividly about the odd experience of being a public school adolescent during the First World War in the expectation that, according to all precedent, you were going to grow up, join the Army, and die, just as all the boys in the classes above you had done. His elder brother died in the trenches at nineteen; the younger boy's life was probably saved by a crippling stammer which led to various rejections over a period of almost two years, "though if the war had gone on I should certainly have been drafted to France".
As it was, he went up to Oxford, spent the vacations serving as unpaid yacht crew and aircraft design apprentice, and came away with a third-class degree and a job at the nascent de Havilland company...
Nevil Shute's politics may not be as sainted in retrospect as Nelson Mandela's, but I'm afraid he's a *far* better writer of autobiography. Being a professional story-teller almost certainly helps there.
Mandela somehow manages to come across as pretty unsympathetic in his own telling, with an air of constantly making excuses and having much to make them for (e.g. overusing phrases like "a freedom fighter has to..." which simultaneously elevate himself and defend his conduct), and he fails to make the tortuous politics of his era interesting. It's difficult to write about committee meetings (even underground prohibited ones) and internal policy disputes, and enthuse the audience thereby, and unmemorable names and sets of initials fly past.
The most involving part of the book is his account of the lost tribal world of his childhood, where he takes it for granted that he was the son of a junior wife with her own compound to which the husband would pay occasional conjugal visits, for example. As soon as he comes to believe that everyone has to forget their individual tribes and become pan-Africans (with nothing in common but the colour of their skin and a mutual grievance), and looks back on his home with the disdain of a city sophisticate regarding the unenlightened masses (and of a revolutionary who speaks in the name of 'the people', then gets annoyed by their stubborn lack of revolutionary spirit), he becomes an unintentionally unsympathetic protagonist.
At least, that's my attempt at analysing why I'm not liking the book very much...
It's interesting reading the Shute biography shortly after having read his two early 'suppressed' novels, of which he is very dismissive in "Slide Rule". It's evident there was clearly a fair degree of autobiographical experience in "Stephen Morris" and its semi-sequel, from the early days of the de Havilland company to the South Coast sailing which features so vividly at the start of the second book; the author claims that "I doubt very much, if any, of it was written twice", which is very likely the case for a first novel, but the result is not noticeably any worse than his early published books, save perhaps in the rather conventional handling of the romance.
It was a bit of a shock to make the connection between his father having been posted to Ireland as the civil servant in charge of the Post Office there during the Edwardian era, and the Easter uprising in Dublin, which took place in the actual building where his father's offices were located (and in which he would have been present at the time, had he not by chance been called away an hour earlier). And Shute writes vividly about the odd experience of being a public school adolescent during the First World War in the expectation that, according to all precedent, you were going to grow up, join the Army, and die, just as all the boys in the classes above you had done. His elder brother died in the trenches at nineteen; the younger boy's life was probably saved by a crippling stammer which led to various rejections over a period of almost two years, "though if the war had gone on I should certainly have been drafted to France".
As it was, he went up to Oxford, spent the vacations serving as unpaid yacht crew and aircraft design apprentice, and came away with a third-class degree and a job at the nascent de Havilland company...
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Date: 2020-09-04 11:13 pm (UTC)I'm afraid I'd un-recommend the Mandela one, having finished it; it left an unsatisfactory taste in my mouth. And I can only assume that Volume 2, which I don't have, is more flattering to its martyred subject... I'm afraid passages like the one where he visits Addis Ababa, proud of Ethiopia's status as an unconquered African kingdom, and is then disappointed by the lack of grand colonial architecture or even paved roads in its capital (but apparently fails to join the dots), and the consuming rivalry between the ANC and the 'upstart' PAC which dominates much of the second half of the book (when he goes abroad he keeps complaining about the lies that the PAC have been spreading, and how everyone sympathises with them and not with his organisation) don't fill me with admiration for the narrator :-(
I'm left with the impression that being imprisoned was probably the making of him as a politician, since he doesn't come across as much of a figure beforehand.