Oddly enough, one of Shute’s biggest failings is one of the things I love about his work. As I have noted previously, and as Kim notes in her review of On the Beach, Shute’s writing cannot be called elegant. In Kim’s words: Setting aside my few complaints, I enjoyed the story immensely. The characters were so well drawn I felt like I knew each one of them. As I got to know Janet I kept hoping that she, who committed suicide at the beginning, would somehow be found alive.... perhaps the dead body was mis-identified ....and the ending would be a happy one, as I've come to expect from Shute. Shute’s saga involves the wartime exploits and subsequent search of former RAF pilot Alan Duncan for a Wren that was involved with his brother in WWII. Through his search Alan revisits his brother’s wartime death, meets some of the Wren’s friends, and offers some insight into his own war injury and complicated recovery. Shute was an engineer and a RAF pilot, and his experiences provides a nuts and bolts approach to wartime work, duties involving both risk and boredom amid day to day living. So many novels explore the excitement and danger of war but provide little insight into what that work actually involves. Shute’s novel goes into great deal of the work of the Wrens, scuba divers and pilots in the war.

To be honest, I'm not sure your original assessment is wrong. There is all that, and it's more evident in some novels than others. When I think about it, it could be that Shute's novels are soap operas for an industrial society, rather than a financial one, which automatically gives them the appearance of rather more substance. An Old Captivity is definitely interesting; it contains the usual simplistic relationship stuff, but large parts of it consist of practical arrangements for a trip to a sub-arctic island, the detail of which is almost anti-fiction. Then you have a book like Ruined City which is a sort of capitalist fairytale and which reflects his extreme right-wing views. At some point I decided that with Shute it was best to take him book by book, if I was at all inclined to do so, and I'm not really - I've been through about half his output and the remainder are marked to read, at some point, someday. The book’s central theme is about the repercussions of war after its end. It is not true that deaths cease at war’s end. People are forever changed by their experiences. There is an exhilaration to war. Look at the appeal war literature has on readers. Those participating in wars may become entranced with the idea that they are doing something vital, something important. Guilt plays in too. After a war, many have difficulty readjusting to civilian life. These are the themes dealt with in the book.All of this plays into Shute's story and is worked beautifully into a story of love, war, regret and family. While the author pulls no punches, he does not dramatize, he tells it like it was, laying bare the hearts of the characters. Even knowing of the eventual end of the pivotal character does not take away from the dramatic tension Shute creates throughout the story. He brings us to slow realizations in a wonderfully artistic manner, dawn breaking finally revealing the true depth of each character. Albeit sad, I can accept Janet’s inability to love and marry anyone other than Bill Duncan, Alan’s brother. With Alan’s return home, that she chooses suicide makes sense to me too. Alan’s love for Janet never felt genuine to me, and his decision to marry Viola Dawson isn’t drawn convincingly either.

Shute also tends to write in a fairly stilted manner, using phrases that seem ridiculous —“The breakfast came upon the table”— and referring to characters by their nationality or occupation —“The Australian”, “The scientist”, “The Commander”— which grate with constant repetition. Requiem for a Wren is a sad story of the consequences of those servicemen/women who served in WWII. War may be over, but for them, it'll never be over. The ghosts of the past haunt them, the guilt weighs them, and an unexplainable restlessness possesses them. They know that they must put the past behind them and adapt to civil life as best as they could. But this is not easy. urn:lcp:requiemforwren0000unse:epub:a30ef13e-9c23-498b-9987-af104de9ed55 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier requiemforwren0000unse Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9g54g300 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0900948086While I accept that guilt is often experienced, I think it is drawn too far in the case of two central characters, both Janet Prentice and Alan Duncan. That Janet takes upon herself the guilt for seven war deaths, feeling she must pay in kind by losing seven she loves dearly, and that Alan feels guilty for Janet’s suicide stretches the power of guilt too far. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over. Nevil Shute is a rare breed of writer. His books are full of danger, romance and other dynamics. But the principal theme in all his work is dignity amid and often accompanied by death. In On the Beach Shute depicted a group of Australians awaiting radiation fall out and subsequent death with strength and forbearance. A Town Called Alice showed a group of Australians living and dying amid the Pacific theater of WWII. The Breaking Waves mines familiar terrain. It follows a group of people through WWII and the subsequent decade or so afterward. Shute’s thesis in this book is that war can go on killing and affecting people long after the final battle. Also, Shute argues that peace is often impossible because people who fight wars in their youth become nostalgic for the war, without realizing it’s their youth they actually miss, and thus will support future wars rather than peace for a chance to return to that excitement. Nothing they realize will ever touch them the way the war did, and they long to return to that feeling all their days. If this sounds heavy for a novel, rest assured Shute is a master at plotting and keeps events moving. I love Shute. Everything I have read of his has been better than the 5-stars I was allowed to give it. I had not intended to read this right now, having just read Pied Piper, but Bob convinced me it would be stupid to push this off so that I could read something I could not be assured would be as satisfying. His arrival home is marred by the apparent suicide, a few hours earlier, of a young Englishwoman named Jessie Proctor, who was his parents' housekeeper. [2]