"Slide Rule", Nevil Shute

[igenlode]

I got a bunch of beetroot with all their leaves still attached at the market, and immediately made a Постный борщ - a Lenten borshch recipe, though I had mine inauthentically with yoghurt (from the market last week; almost finished now, alas).

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I finished "Slide Rule", and continue to be very impressed. I think the book benefits from the subconscious tension of the reader's not knowing the outcome; most biographies of famous people lead up to the inevitable triumph of whatever it was that the person is well known for, but like C.S.Forester's "Long Before Forty", this is almost entirely the story of what the author did before he was a successful writer. And because we know (or are fairly sure) that he didn't end up as the director of a successful aircraft manufacturing concern, there's a certain air of impending disaster hanging over his account of the years he spent trying to keep afloat an innovative, constantly-impecunious company that nobody has ever heard of.

(In fact, that story has a much happier ending than I'd expected -- and I know I've read this book before, but I have absolutely zero recollection of it. They finally come up with a successful government contract and end up selling thousands of aircraft for the use of the RAF, but the author basically loses interest as soon as his creation is on a firm financial footing. "I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit.... I was a starter and useless as a runner."
I've still never heard of the Airspeed Oxford, even in the context of WW2 bomber training, but apparently it was a bona fide success, even if Airspeed Ltd was eventually re-absorbed by Shute's original employers and is now completely forgotten.)

The book doesn't answer my curiosity about the author's acquaintance with France and the French, beyond an offhand allusion to a skiing holiday and a later trip abroad to the Jura. However, one can definitely recognise the source of several of the elements in later novels, such as the character who makes a deliberate decision to break the law in order to save his company from bankruptcy. And I was thrilled to discover that not only does Shute claim to have had the actor Clive Brook (who impressed me so much in Underworld) in mind as the protagonist when writing his novel "Lonely Road" (which I can definitely visualise), but that a film was subsequently made of it... starring Clive Brook himself! What's more, a print still survives, and it sounds as if it was a good performance -- although the 'happy ending' clearly wasn't the bleak one in the original plot. (It would have been quite easy to tweak that finale slightly to give the protagonist some happiness instead of a 'too little, too late' realisation, and to be frank I think I'm glad there's a version out there in which somebody did.)

I was also curious as to whether the senior engineer mentioned in passing as "B.N.Wallis" might be any chance be the same as the famous Barnes Wallis of the 'bouncing bomb' -- a subsequent allusion to the Wellington bomber confirms that he evidently was. I had no idea that Shute had worked directly under Barnes Wallis, or that the latter had originally found success as an airship designer and been intimately involved in the R.101/R.100 project! It occurs to me that Shute's depiction of the civilian Professor Legge's involvement in weapons development in the novel "Landfall" is distinctly reminiscent of the description of Barnes Wallis's relationship to the risks the young pilots were taking in Paul Brickhill's "The Dam Busters", and in retrospect I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the character was inspired by Wallis. {edit: Yes, the theory has been put forward.}

Of course I did remember that Nevil Shute himself had been involved in the airship project; in fact, I think this was probably my chief interest in the book at the time when I first read it, since that's the only part I recognised. And naturally there's an air of impending doom over that part of the book also, not just on account of the foreshadowing in the text (a lot of people Shute mentions are described as subsequently losing their lives) but because in this case the outcome is still notorious; the fate of the R.101 remains as cataclysmic as that of the Hindenburg, and in large part responsible for the dire image of airships over several succeeding generations.

Shute gives an insider's account, and (naturally) a biased one. But as a narrator he comes across out of it well, bending over backwards to acknowledge the pressures that virtually everyone on the rival team must have faced, from the civil servants who did not have the technical expertise to question committee decisions, to the design staff trapped by their own advance publicity, the engineers who had no source of peer review, since they themselves were critiquing their competitors' designs, and the aircrew who were expected to fly both their employers' 'official' airship and her commercial rival, and did, by Shute's account, an honourable job. And there is what must have been the longstanding survivors' guilt of the successful R.100 team: by insisting on carrying out the test flight to Canada according to the original schedule, "we drove the final stake into the palisade around them, blocking their one way out". He adds later that it was probably a good thing that none of his team were called to testify in the public enquiry into the disaster, since "the conclusions reached were almost certainly correct" and "we had said derogatory things about the competence the the government staff and we could hardly have gone back on those opinions at the enquiry"; they, too were trapped by "the bitterness of competition".

Here, as in many other places in the book, Shute makes it clear that he felt one thing (understandably) in the past and in the heat of the moment, and that with hindsight he thinks differently and perhaps more even-handedly now; this is precisely where Nelson Mandela's autobiography fails, with its air of forever needing to excuse the past where it doesn't fit the current image. Shute's High Tory politics are as evident throughout his autobiography as Mandela's own conviction that "the African", whatever his origin, is somehow a natural born socialist when not led astray by European influence -- but Mandela's beliefs manage to come across as naive and self-contradictory (e.g. he only seems to respect the powers of the hereditary chiefs when they happen to agree with his campaign, yet talks of restoring the democracy of the old way of rule), whereas one can see exactly where Shute's own experiences have led to his personal dogmas. And he makes a case, for example, for the conclusion that the landed gentry make the best government officials precisely because they have the resources and free time to engage in risky sports which train them to make quick decisions in matters of high stakes, and because they have sufficient private means to face the possibility of being sacked for giving an unwelcome opinion, rather than being yes-men for the sake of their wives and families. (As I recall, this was the original argument against giving M.P.s a paid salary: that their voting choices would be influenced unduly by their dependence on keeping their jobs.)

Despite the fact that I don't share his disdain for 'the dead hand of the State', he manages to come across as clear-eyed and humane, rather than just having a chip on his shoulder; indeed, in many ways the book is almost diffident. (It's also an extremely good example of how to make a character with political beliefs very different from your own into a sympathetic protagonist!)

"Slide Rule" is subtitled "The Autobiography of an Engineer", and is only peripherally about Shute's apprenticeship as a novelist, although he comments that "I have always liked to do two jobs at the same time; one helps you rest from the other", and that writing in the evenings probably helped clear his mind to a fresh view of his engineering problems the next day.
His description of the writing process is interesting, as the description of professional novelists' personal experience of writing usually is to the amateur: he writes
I used to find that the story became fixed in the first writing; I do not think that I ever altered a scene or the essentials of a piece of dialogue in a subsequent writing. A re-writing increased the length by about ten per cent; awkward phrases and sentences were eliminated, and the general style of the writing was improved. Since the first writing probably took a year, one came to the chapter fresh in the re-writing, a year older, with a year past in which one had forgotten much of the detail; this undoubtedly helped in putting the thing into a better style. [With] increasing experience I find that I can say pretty much what I want to say the first time. Perhaps thirty per cent of my later books have been re-written; I re-write the first chapter always as a matter of principle since it is seldom in tune with the rest of the book. I do not seem to get into my stride till the first chapter is over.

Comments

[watervole]

I have to read this one.

[igenlode]

I'd definitely recommend it if you can get hold of a copy.

It's an interesting slice of engineering history in its own right -- Shute has the technical writer's skill of conveying large amounts of relatively abstruse information to the reader while making it enjoyable to learn about the subject -- and also intriguing where you can see the parallels with some of the novels he would write/was writing. I do find it a little scary just how much of the work he describes has since been taken over by computers; he was originally employed on the airship project as Chief Calculator, crunching figures non-stop to ascertain stresses on a trial and error basis and re-running calculations if and when the results failed to add up. That's an entire sphere of employment that no longer exists at all.