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"What Happened to the Corbetts", Nevil Shute
I thought I'd read all Shute's books (and indeed it turns out I actually own a copy of this one!), but I had no recollection of ever having encountered "What Happened to the Corbetts" before -- and given the subject matter, I think I probably would have remembered it. I can see *why* it's not familiar among his 'canon'; it is an unexpected experiment that could best be described as speculative fiction, I suppose. This is the story of Britain undergoing heavy bombing at the start of a World War II that had at the time of writing, not (quite) actually happened, and ultimately did not take place quite as described -- in this reality, the characters find refuge across the Channel in a sympathetic France which is harbouring the Royal Navy but still at peace, for example. So the novel would effectively have become 'outdated' within a year of publication, and sits oddly alongside wartime books like "Pied Piper" or "Most Secret", with their real-life settings in an all-too-Nazi-occupied France.
Judging by the post-war preface ("I write this story to tell people what the coming bombing attacks would really be like, and what they really had to guard against. I was right in my guess that gas would not be used and in the disruption of civil life that would be caused by high explosives. I overlooked the importance of fire"), the book was written less as drama than as something between propaganda and a dire warning, attempting to stir up public opinion and divert the government away from the chimera of gas masks.
In practice he got about 50% of the predictions right, which makes for oddly disconcerting reading -- it's more like John Wyndham in "The Triffids" or "The Kraken Wakes" than your average WW2 novel. Cholera breaks out, the Isle of Wight refuses to admit refugees from the mainland, and the protagonists (and their three small children) in their small yacht find themselves commandeered to rescue the crew of a ditched aircraft mid-Channel, thus saving themselves by gaining the gratitude of the Navy. And the (carefully un-nnamed) Germans turn out to have developed a new 'gyroscopic sextant' which allows them to bomb by dead reckoning from 20,000 feet in total cloud cover.
Peter Corbett is supposed to be a public-school-educated solicitor, but to my ear he and his wife sound more like the lower-middle-class protagonists of many of Shute's other books compared to, say, John Howard of "Pied Piper". And I couldn't help wincing at the couple's ongoing attempts to feed their unweaned baby on difficult-to-acquire supplies of fresh cow's milk and tins (although of course several generations of children *were* raised on just such a diet, after wet-nursing went out of fashion, and many of them have survived into a robust old age). But it's an interesting dystopian alternate-reality adventure, written rather closer to the time than most such attempts. And it was evidently popular enough to reprint in more than one edition post-war.
Judging by the post-war preface ("I write this story to tell people what the coming bombing attacks would really be like, and what they really had to guard against. I was right in my guess that gas would not be used and in the disruption of civil life that would be caused by high explosives. I overlooked the importance of fire"), the book was written less as drama than as something between propaganda and a dire warning, attempting to stir up public opinion and divert the government away from the chimera of gas masks.
In practice he got about 50% of the predictions right, which makes for oddly disconcerting reading -- it's more like John Wyndham in "The Triffids" or "The Kraken Wakes" than your average WW2 novel. Cholera breaks out, the Isle of Wight refuses to admit refugees from the mainland, and the protagonists (and their three small children) in their small yacht find themselves commandeered to rescue the crew of a ditched aircraft mid-Channel, thus saving themselves by gaining the gratitude of the Navy. And the (carefully un-nnamed) Germans turn out to have developed a new 'gyroscopic sextant' which allows them to bomb by dead reckoning from 20,000 feet in total cloud cover.
Peter Corbett is supposed to be a public-school-educated solicitor, but to my ear he and his wife sound more like the lower-middle-class protagonists of many of Shute's other books compared to, say, John Howard of "Pied Piper". And I couldn't help wincing at the couple's ongoing attempts to feed their unweaned baby on difficult-to-acquire supplies of fresh cow's milk and tins (although of course several generations of children *were* raised on just such a diet, after wet-nursing went out of fashion, and many of them have survived into a robust old age). But it's an interesting dystopian alternate-reality adventure, written rather closer to the time than most such attempts. And it was evidently popular enough to reprint in more than one edition post-war.