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Pied Piper by Nevil Shute
This book was recommended to me by a friend and I'm glad I read it.
It's set during WW2 and was written while the war was still ongoing and the outcome unknown.
War is not kind to old men. Too old to fight and with little sense of purpose, John Howard goes to southern France to take a break fishing.
While there, he is asked by an acquaintance if he will take their two children back to England for safety, as the war is spreading further and they no longer feel safe.
Howard agrees, but what should have been a simple journey home gets more and more complicated as the Germans start advancing across France. Trains get cancelled, food gets harder to find. Being English suddenly becomes very dangerous, and to make life even more difficult, there are other children that the war has left in dire straits.
One of the reasons this story works so well for me is that Howard is a very believable character. He's not a man given to emotional outbursts or temper - he's calm and organised and takes things as they come. Which is not to say that he isn't worried or concerned or uncaring, but he's 70 and he knows his own physical limitations and he also knows exactly how hard you can push young children before everything becomes too much for them. Therefore, when he has to take things slowly, he accepts that and doesn't waste energy over things he can't control.
He manages to shield the children, as far as he can, from a full understanding of what is going on around them, and oddly enough, this makes the reader even more aware of the impact of war.
In a quiet, understated way, this is war from the civilian angle, long streams of refugees, people dying in allied bombing raids, the ongoing struggle for food and shelter.
Do they make it safely to England?
Read the book and find out for yourself.
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I think we did 'On the Beach' at school. It was pretty okay, but I got more out of it as an adult.
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I recently read "Most Secret"; I thought I'd read all Shute's novels, even the unsatisfactory ones, but I had zero recollection of that one. Apparently it was also written during wartime and actually suppressed by the authorities, presumably because it was felt to give too much away -- it's very odd to imagine these books being written under circumstances that would basically make them the author's death-warrant if an invasion succeeded. ("Most Secret" is about secret commando operations -- at least, that's not what it's *about*, but it's what ends up happening.)
Given the lead-time on the average novel, it's also hard for me to imagine a writer having the professional nerve to write a story set 'today' during an ongoing abnormal situation, on the assumption that it would still be ongoing by the time his readership got to read the printed result... (Of course in the case of that novel they *didn't* in fact get to read it until it was 'obsolete'!)
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I thought it was a very powerful book. But I'm not sure people who like "Pied Piper" because they don't normally like Nevil Shute would like it; it has a much darker, more visceral edge (and having read that book recently put a lot more tension into the ending of "Pied Piper" for me). If you liked "Lonely Road" or his violent thrillers of the 1930s, then you might appreciate it more, I think.
The nameless first-person narrator is the same harassed mid-ranking commander as in "Pied Piper", whom one assumes to be a self-insert by Shute himself.
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I think 'Trustee from the Tool Room' is my favourite Shute.
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One thing that did strike me after reading "Most Secret" and "Pied Piper" in quick succession is that the climax of both actually takes place in what is virtually the same location, which lends a far greater tension to the ending of the latter book where the reader is concerned, given the parallels. (Also interesting from the "Phantom" point of view, in that this is the Perros-Guirec setting.) I found myself wondering if Nevil Shute had a personal connection to the area, and how well he knew France; the 'French' dialogue in the book certainly evokes back-translated French usage, although that may just be contemporary literary convention for writing funny foreigners (Freeman Wills Crofts uses a similar style for the French-speaking scenes in "Mystery in the Channel").
I must reread "Slide Rule"; all I remember of his biography is the airship bits.
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I always remember the scene where he's making the eggs for her.
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