In the Wet in Around the World in 80 Books

Dec 09, 2024 Tony rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: audio, setting-england, novels, setting-oceania

Most readers know Shute from his two "classics" (On the Beach, A Town Called Alice), but I've really enjoyed a number of his lesser-known books, such as The Trustee From the Toolroom, Pied Piper, and Requiem For A Wren. So I picked this up knowing nothing about it but fully expecting to enjoy it. Reader, I did not.

The book opens relatively promisingly, following an English parson around rural northern Queensland in the 1950s (when the book was written). It's an interesting glimpse into the past Most readers know Shute from his two "classics" (On the Beach, A Town Called Alice), but I've really enjoyed a number of his lesser-known books, such as The Trustee From the Toolroom, Pied Piper, and Requiem For A Wren. So I picked this up knowing nothing about it but fully expecting to enjoy it. Reader, I did not.

The book opens relatively promisingly, following an English parson around rural northern Queensland in the 1950s (when the book was written). It's an interesting glimpse into the past and one that oddly-enough crosses paths with another book I've recently read, Herb Wharton's Unbranded, which tells the lives of several drovers in the same general area and has a similar lengthy description of a country horse gathering. However, when the parson is called to the deathbed of a drunk old-timer, the book gets really weird -- and boring.

It jumps forward thirty years to 1983 to tell the story of an Australian Air Force pilot who becomes involved the very convoluted and mind-numbingly boring details of how the British royal family is to be flown around the various points of the Commonwealth, and how that relates to a constitutional crisis that threatens the end of the House of Windsor. It's basically all a projection of British post-war austerity, and sentiments of how Canada and Australia are going to rise in prosperity above mother England. There are mentions of a third world war, but the world seems completely unchanged, and things like computers and modern telecommunications are not in evidence. It's kind of a science-fiction tale with no science and very little fiction...

There is a sweet love story that consists of the pilot wooing one of the queen's assistants, and there is some rather forward-thinking direct discussion of race (one of the pilot's grandmothers was Aboriginal), but the whole enterprise is so mired in hand-wringing about the monarchy and Commonwealth that I can't imagine any modern reader other than die-hard monarchists being at all interested, much less entertained, by the proceedings. The book then comes back to the framework of the parson at the deathbed, and ends on a clunky note of what is essentially reincarnation.

Note: Potential readers should know that the protagonist insists on going by a nickname that's a racial slur starting with the letter N, so that his race is out in the open. While this is an interesting -- and arguably radical -- approach for a book written in 1953, it's hard to read some 70 years later, regardless of the original intent. ...more

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Apr 25, 2018 Karen rated it liked it

I have read 3 other works by Shute, and have enjoyed them all, particularly, A Town Like Alice. In the Wet is a work of speculative fiction where he prognosticates the fate of Great Britain 30 years in the future (1982). Shute is obviously unhappy with the British government after WWII, hence his emigration to Australia and a major theme in this book. I found that this overt disdain for socialism did not make for a really good book that Shute is certainly capable of. ...more

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