What Happened to the Corbetts / Pastoral

by Nevil Shute

Genres: War

471 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1968

About the author

Nevil Shute Norway was a popular British novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer.

He used Nevil Shute as his pen name, and his full name in his engineering career, in order to protect his engineering career from any potential negative publicity in connection with his novels.

He lived in Australia for the ten years before his death.

Reviews

[Jennifer]

So, I went with my dad into a used bookstore that recently opened in the small town next to ours; it's a lovely place. I picked up two novels by Nevil Shute because they dealt with war and one by Mary Renault that I'd read when I was very small and thought I'd revisit. Haven't gotten to that one, but did just finish the second Shute book. The man was a racist, and his characters in this earlier book published in 1939 are even more painfully self-satisfied British middle-class than in the other. Noting that unpleasantness that pervades the book (I mean, the racism is even self-replicating, given one of the children's books), the rest is very interesting; a year before WWII, Shute anticipated a German bombing campaign against London and how it would impact life there, from the dangers of the bombs themselves to the loss of fresh water, the threats of cholera and typhoid, people rioting and turning on each other and soldiers sent to marshal and quarantine them; the challenges of mustering volunteer soldiers/sailors/airmen with families at risk; the loss of doctors and medical facilities in the bombings, and more. It's hard not to think of Russia's campaign in Ukraine now as you near the end of the novel and characters are assuring themselves that something like will not happen again because of how bombing civilians rallies the world against the victimized country. *sigh* Anyway, the family is obnoxious, but the onset of war in suburbia is interestingly described and almost enough to make a survivalist of me.

[Drew]

Pastoral by Nevil Shute (1944)