Backlisted - Trustee From The Toolroom by Nevil Shute

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

For our 200th episode, we are joined by Richard Osman: television presenter, longtime Backlisted listener, and one of the bestselling authors in the world today. We discuss Trustee from the Toolroom (1960), the final novel by Nevil Shute Norway, whose other books include A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957), widely read in his lifetime but now somewhat forgotten or ignored. How did Shute's long and distinguished stint as an aeronautical engineer fit with his parallel career as a prominent and much-loved author? And what do his tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things have to offer us in the 21st century? Richard also shares with John and Andy what he's been reading this week; and if you've been with us from the start, you will appreciate his choices all the more. Thank you all so much for your continued support over the last 200 episodes. Andy, John and producer Nicky *If you'd like to sign up to our forthcoming monthly newsletter which will feature book recommendations from our guests and hosts, please click this link here. *For those in the South / West of the UK, Backlisted will be appearing live at the Woodstock Poetry festival near Oxford on Sat Dec 2nd with an episode on Briggflatts by Basil Bunting. Tickets are available to buy here. *To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BetterHelp.com. meeting with friends before the show, we can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. MUSIC PLAYS Hello and welcome to this, the 200th episode of Backlisted, the podcast which continues to give new life to old books.

Something a little different today. We're actually, for the first time ever, being filmed live. It's not live for you, but it will be live when you see it. Anyway. OK. Shall I do that again? No, we'll get the hang of that. That's fine.

OK. Today you find us in the basement of a late Victorian house in the West London suburb of Ealing sometime in the late 1950s. It's a very neat room with a long woodworking bench, a desk and a drawing board and a strong smell of sawdust. An extractor fan purrs gently above the bench and a short, slightly overweight man sits at the desk examining a copper box. Beside him stands a tall man in a naval overcoat looking in admiration at the box and its contents. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read.

And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And for this special show, our 200th, we have invited a special guest. It's the 200-year-old Richard Osman. Welcome, Richard. Hello, gentlemen. How lovely to be here. It's so nice to see you. Richard is a producer, comedian, television presenter,

and a best-selling author. And when we say best-selling author, John, we mean best-selling author. We don't mean better than some other folks selling author. We mean best-selling author. Top of the tree. As a producer at Endemol, he worked on classic shows such as Deal or No Deal and 8 Out of 10 Cats.

But it was his own creation, Pointless, that saw him step out of a behind-the-scenes role to become a household name. As co-presenter with his friend Alexander Armstrong, he appeared in 1,300 episodes. I think it's 2,000. No! I think it's 2,000.

I don't know where that's from, but it's... Oh, I wish it had only been 1,300. The time I would have had back. That's incredible. It's a lot, right? Yeah. I mean, 30 series, something like that. Yeah, so it was a lot.

Let's just pretend this isn't the 200th one, because suddenly it seems puny. It's pathetic. Only 1,800 to go, gents. Yeah. He left that role in early 2022 so he could spend more time on his writing, a theme we will return to in the main body of the go, gents. Yeah. He left that role in early 2022 so he could spend more time on his writing, a theme we will return to in the main body of the show.

In Richard's case, this proved a smart move. Beginning with The Thursday Murder Club in 2020, Richard's series of crime novels has torn up the record books. His debut novel was the fastest-selling debut crime novel of all time and the first debut crime novel to be a UK Christmas number one. All four books have been bestsellers both here and in the US and Richard's books have now spent...

I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing in delight with you. Honestly, if I hadn't heard of me, I would hate me. I am sorry. They've spent an astonishing 57 weeks in the UK number one spot and sold over 10 million copies globally. Wow. His latest novel, The Last Devil to Die, published in September by Viking in the UK

and Pamela Dorman Books in the US, sold 146,919 in the UK. You must have been disappointed to not get the 20. I would have loved to get 147,000. Making it the fastest-selling British hardback novel of all time. Richard greets us with the news saying he needed to sit down. And so there you go. Take it easy.

Fine, it's the first time I've sat down since. And given it's our 200th episode, before we plunge into the main show, we'd love to take this opportunity to ask you a few questions about your own relationship with books and reading. Given that, you will have changed the course of popular literary entertainment in this country, in the States, and jacket design. I can't help noticing, I keep seeing books that look rather like yours

on the bookshelves. How does that feel? Well, it's a guy called Richard Bravery who did this cover. And funnily enough, we're doing the cover. I've got a new series coming out next year and we're coming up with cover designs for that. And that's a lot of fun

because essentially Richard is doing the next thing that people can copy. That's what we're doing. So that's a completely new, not the Thursday Murder Club characters at all. Yeah, not the Thursday Murder Club. They will be coming back, but yeah, a whole new series with a whole new look, which I think will be equally iconic because we're ripping off something else equally iconic.

In time-honoured fashion. Hall of Mirrors. Yeah. Hall of Mirrors. Publishing. Derivative with a twist, TM, Don Draper. Derivative with a twist, TM, Don Draper. So, Richard, did you... I feel you must have grown up in a bookish house.

No, not at all, funnily enough. And, you know, my brother is a great deal more bookish than me. The books we had, my mum had some Agatha Christie. There was, like, Judith Krantz and Harold Robbins, that sort of thing. But, no, not really, we didn't. And I have very, very bad eyesight, so it took me a long time to start reading. When I was a kid, I would read a lot, read Famous Five and all that,

because the font is quite big in kids' books. And as soon as you get onto actual books, it's like, oh, I can't read this, I'll watch TV instead. And there wasn't really an option, there wasn't a sort of audiobook option in those days. Exactly, yeah, you absolutely couldn't listen to it. And as I got older an option, wasn't a sort of audio book option in those days. Exactly, yeah. You absolutely couldn't listen to it. And as I got older, I thought,

you're just going to take a long time to read books. But it took me a long time to get, because I couldn't read at the speed other people were reading. And so I couldn't quite work out how they were enjoying this experience as much as I was, because it was quite hard work for me. That's fascinating, yeah. Richard, your elder brother, Matt, also a novelist,

plays bass in a group called Suede. He sure does. Now, you and Suede all came from, as you say, like a dormy town in Sussex, right? Yeah. Near Haywards Heath. In Haywards Heath. In Haywards Heath.

Suburban, you say. Suburban. We're always like that. You could not be more suburban. It's like a suburb of a suburb. But the thing is, you know, genuinely, I thought of something I can remember Brett Anderson, the singer of Suede, saying in an interview back in the 90s,

where he said, you know, we're from the suburbs, but the thing is, all the good stuff comes from the suburbs. You know, punk, glam, acid house, techno. What's the city ever given us? Acid jazz, he said. He's right though, isn't he? And that Brett was from Linfield, which is a suburb of Hayward Sea. The chip on his shoulder is immense.

But it's true because I think an awful lot of people will do anything they can to get out. And Matt did and Brett did. That's not me. I like being in the suburbs. That's where I Brett did. That's not me. I like being in the suburbs. That's where I feel safe. That's where I feel comfortable. That's my Britain.

So it's London that feels alien to me. I mean, listen, I've just about got used to it. Take me back to Croydon, everyone. Take me back to Croydon. Take me back to dear old Croydon. I think we're five minutes in. That's pretty good. So did Matt pass books on to you?

Or was his status as your older brother a guarantee that you'd go down different paths? Yeah, and also I think he realised that that wasn't what I was interested in. Music was his thing, so he'd pass music on to me. So I found Bowie through him and Jesus and Mary Chain and Smiths and all of those bands, and Suede would sort of rehearse upstairs. So any coolness I have in me, a i have about 3.7 percent coolness right and i and i really i go to that well again and again and again but it's uh it's it's the same

well that all comes from matt but yeah i don't really remember him reading but he must have done because he's so insanely well read and you know that can't just come from 20 onwards but perhaps it did yeah we weren't we weren't a bookish household that's very that's very very interesting um before i ask you a once traditional question that we've now ditched on here um moved andy not we've moved that's true listen all formats have to adapt you have to evolve that's the thing like a shark moving forward listeners pay heed to what richard said i'll see pointless we changed the format so many times it never quite worked

um i i want to know you're very generous in your um the way you talk about books and other writers and um and in fact we the thing that inspired us to ask you to come and join us on here for show 200 was you managed to put um a month in the country by jl carr which was the subject of the very first episode of that listed eight years ago you managed to put it back into the bestseller charts yeah one of my honestly one of my proudest achievements yeah it is it's great i love it. But tell us about that. Do you think, I mean, all right, you read it, you love it.

You think, OK, I could talk about this. Do you pause and think, I want to keep this for me? God, no. Reading is a joy. And the one thing about being an author as well, the one thing that keeps me sane as an author, is understanding I'm part of an industry. You know, if I was just thinking I want to live or die on the quality of my work and being remembered and, you know, the quality of my imagery, I think that's too hard.

What I like is to finish the book and then suddenly you're part of a big gang, which is publishers, which is editors, which is bookshops, which is booksellers. And that's an industry that's sort of gone from strength to strength in the last five years, bookselling. And, you know, that to me is the ecosystem that I'm a part of. And that's what keeps me sane is thinking, no, I'm just one cog in that wheel. And every time I sell a book, a bookseller has sold a book as well. So everyone's getting there.

So it's like a community, right? Exactly that. Readers and writers. And listen, there isn't a high street in Britain that isn't better without a bookshop in it. And there isn't a home in Britain which isn't better without another book in it. And so any time I come across a book,

I have mainstream tastes and I always have done. That's where my TV stuff comes from. If I read a book like a month in the country that I think everybody will love, then I'm going to shout from the rooftops. Because it's a brilliant book, but that everyone will also love. And that's such a rare kind of, you know,

that Venn diagram. And, you know, there's that On Golden Hill by Francis Buffard. Yeah, great. It's a brilliant book that everyone will love. Life After Life, Kate Atkinson. Brilliant book, but everyone will love. So anytime I comekinson brilliant book that everyone will love so anytime I come across one of those

I try and sing it from the rooftops because you make the world a better place if you bring great books into people's lives. I seem to remember John that one of the reasons that we wanted to do A Month in the Country early on and in fact for the first episode was because neither of us ever met anyone who

didn't like that book if they'd heard of it. That was the trick. It is mad, isn't it? Because I've given two copies away this week to people in the village because we were having a discussion and people say, oh, I've sort of fallen out of reading. And then you suddenly think, I know the entry-level drug

that will get you back onto reading. If you want a great, really short book, then I've got it for you. And that's the thing. I mean, the short book, then I've got it for you. The shortness does help because people don't feel intimidated by it. So what have you been reading this week? That's what we used to ask one another. Now we're asking you.

What have you been reading this week? Okay, well, listen, I'm going to say something probably neither of you ever said. I am listening to, I think, it's the third book in a series. And I genuinely think this series is the funniest series of books ever written in the English language.

And I will absolutely die on that hill. You heard it here first, folks. And it's the new Adam Partridge book. We love them! We've talked about them on this show several times. Written by Neil and Rob Gibbons. And all three books from start

to finish, the comedy comes from such crazy angles. It's like Total Football. It's like the Dutch in the 1970s. I agree. Jokes coming from places you don't expect jokes from. The audiobooks, I think, are amazing, because you've got Coogan reading them as well. But the sheer

quality and volume of jokes, of character stuff, of story, of bathos, I find it genuinely mind-blowing. And if we took comedy seriously in this country, critically seriously, then we'd be singing from the rooftops. I'm sure

we talked about the Partridge books when Sarah Perry was on. I think we did. She's a massive fan. And we said we thought that they were the perfect Partridge vehicle that he'd found. He'd found the absolute kind of, listening to him delivering them in that.

But also the Gibbonsies are really good at, I take my hat off to them. We all like observing publishing trends and making jokes about them. They are so good at spotting a walking memoir, or whatever the new one is, or building a lighthouse. Yeah, building a lighthouse. I think, Richard, what you're saying about Coogan's reading of them, what's so wonderful is they're very funny books to read on the page.

But the audiobooks, this is a mark of Steve Coogan's incredible talent. He doesn't just read them as Alan Partridge. He reads them and leaves the listener with the impression that Alan is terribly pleased to be doing something as prestigious as reading his own book. He's reading them as Alan Partridge reading Alan Partridge. That's right.

I mean, literally, at the very start of the first book, the page says acknowledgements, and it just says, at this time, there is nobody I wish to acknowledge. I mean, come on. That's so nice. But it's interesting, isn't it? How is that not sung from the rooftops as just a great song? Come on. That's so nice. But it's interesting, isn't it, that that would... How is that not sung from the rooftops as a great...

Just a great, great work? It is by us and many right-thinking people. I also say, you know, funnily enough, this is germane to what we've got coming up in a future episode, but I always am grateful when comedians and comic writers make those books so much better than they need to be yeah do you know what i mean this is the thing it's this idea that you said mainstream taste yeah or you know what used to be called middle-brow taste, as though this is kind of an undifferentiated lump of all the same quality.

It's not. To write great mainstream comedy, to write great mainstream anything, takes as much skill, as much, I think, as much practice and as much time as it does to write literature. I mean, of course it does. Listen, we're going to get onto it in the book we're talking about today. There's similar issues there.

But yeah, I think critically, there's a certain highbrow critic who's not capable of knowing why one mainstream novel sells and another doesn't, or one mainstream novel works and another doesn't. It's not in their wheelhouse because they're using different criteria. And so reading reviews of mainstream novels is very hard because it's not, especially if they're funny, they literally lose all ability to understand what they're reading.

It does not compute. Yeah, but it really doesn't. I think you'll see this in the reviews. It's a huge motivation for why we wanted to do this podcast is yeah not because we particularly feel that we need to hold the you know mainstream the the flag for mainstream literature but because it's so rare to get any space where you can talk about the what used to be called high and low culture whatever you want to call it the spread of stuff and being able to be able to discriminate yeah you know between those things

and to be able to have proper conversations um about their their value and their the skill of the of the people who've written and put together is is ridiculously rare yeah and it's you know it's always interesting to see what endures yes you know, and who endures and what writing, you know, just go, okay, that was, you know, as you say, things when they're reviewed at the time and you read them now and you just go, oh, no, this is the one that's, you know, look at Barbara Pym or something like that and, you know, just think of the big male novelists who are writing

at the same time who just sort of disappeared into the ether. It's funny you should mention Barbara Pym because I know how much you like Barbara. I want to run my theory by you, Richard, and if you disagree with it, I'm going to ignore that and I'm going to publish and be damned. OK. OK, so your novels, The Thursday Murder Club,

The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed, The Last Devil To Die. Yeah. I read an interview where you said they were partly inspired by The A-Team. Yes. I think I've reverse-engineered that partly inspired by the A-Team. Yes. I think I've reverse-engineered that theory, but yeah, for sure. What do you mean?

I think that having seen their success, I was trying to think, well, how on earth did that happen? And then I thought about how much I loved the A-Team when I was growing up. It's in your brain, you know. Yeah, it's a gang where everybody, whatever problem comes along, one of them has the solution. Team of all talents. A team of all talents, exactly.

OK, so I'm not going to disagree with your reverse-engineered theory, but I'm saying there's another book that no-one on earth would have thought of crossing with the A-team to create the best-selling books of the 21st century, and that novel is Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn. Yes, lovely. Listen, I take that's Quartet in Autumn. Yes, lovely. Listen, I take that. Quartet in Autumn meets The A-Team.

Yeah. Yes! I'll take that. It's a winner. But it's, yeah, again, it's reverse engineered. That's for sure. All criticism is reverse engineered. But let's just pause and say Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym,

first of all, because it's about a quartet of elderly people as your novels are and it is kind of funny in a very very very dark way brilliant waspish female characters and wonderful but as you say

about the type of books we're talking about in today's episode you know Barbara Pym actually went through a phase in her career where she couldn't get published because people assumed that she was just a little old lady writing about vicars. And you read it now and you just think, how on earth did that happen?

But then, you know, you look at Mick Heron, who was sort of out of sorts, and then John Murray came and republishedlished him how does Mick Heron not sell I mean you know when you read someone who can like Barbara who can write so beautifully I remember when they were seriously talking about dropping Ian Rankin because he just you know just wasn't getting the figures and then he wrote will Ian be pleased to hear you say that I No, no, no. I'm not sure. He knows this. Then he wrote, I think it was Black and Blue.

There was one that was slightly bigger. He put more into it or something. I don't know. Nobody really knows. Boom, suddenly. And then you've got six books that he's already, you know, the rest, as they say, is history. Literally history.

Well, listen, Richard, we have a running joke on this show about publishers' use of the phrase master storyteller. Yeah, yeah. And yet, it seems fair to say on this episode 200, you, a master storyteller, have brought to the table perhaps the master storyteller of the 20th century, right? I mean, it's the perfect landing. John?

We love that. Let's put the listeners out of their misery and say what we're going to be talking about today, the main event. The book Richard has chosen is by, as Andy has said, another best-selling British author. It is Trustee from the Tool Room by Neville Shute, first published in 1960 by Heinemann, the last of Shute's best-selling sequence of 23 novels,

and it was published posthumously. It tells the story of Keith Stewart, a working-class man with Scottish roots who lives modestly with his wife in the West London suburb of Ealing. Suburbs there. Ealing, no. And who makes ends meet by writing a how-to column in a popular magazine called Miniature Mechanic. After his sister and her husband are killed while sailing in the Pacific en route to a new life in Vancouver,

Keith and his wife Katie adopt Janice, his nine-year-old niece. Keith is made trustee in the will and discovers that all his sister and brother-in-law's savings had been converted into diamonds to avoid the strict British rules over exporting currency. More of that later, I suspect. I know this doesn't sound... No, as you're describing... Don't switch off.

Don't switch off. This sounds like the weirdest book. It really does, yeah. It both is and it isn't, yes. Despite never having left the country before, Keith decides it is his duty to visit the site of the wreck on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific and try to recover the diamonds.

To do this with next to no money, he must discover new depths of courage and ingenuity, and most of the novel is an account of his extraordinary adventure. He is helped on his way by many different people, the crew of a commercial aircraft, a Jewish-American tycoon who's made his fortune in lumber, and most memorably by Jack Donnelly, a big-hearted, half-Polynesian sailor

who crosses the vast distances of the Pacific in a boat he's built himself with little in the way of traditional navigational aids. Now, this book may not be one of Neville Shute's best-known novels. In fact, we were saying before we came on air, and I'm prepared to confess this, when Richard suggested it, I had never heard of it, and I now, having spent a week finding out more about it,

I'm so ashamed of not knowing, because this is one of his best-loved and was a huge bestseller. It was one of the top bestsellers of 1960. It was a Book of the Month Club selection in the USA, albeit with a slightly lukewarm endorsement by... You've written here, the Richard Osman of his day. Who just said he's Neville Shue?

He can't be Neville Shue and... And Clifton Fadiman, no. Clifton Fadiman. Clifton Fadiman. Imagine being a big radio personality and also a critic and also a novel. Who does that now? Wow.

Okay. Well, listen, this is what Clifton Fadiman, damning with fake praise, I think. Fading Fadiman, who wrote that Trusty from the Tool Room was, quote, an exciting story, honestly conceived, even if devoid of much literary grace. I'd take that. I'd have that on the front of my next one.

Beautiful. In any event, by 1972, the book's paperback jacket could boast that Shute had sold over 14 million novels. Some to go, yeah. And his work has remained in print ever since, with Vintage reissuing all 23 of them as recently as 2009. So, Richard, before we discuss all the things to do with this book, why Neville Shute was so successful in his day

and is so little read now, we think, when did you first come across a book by Neville Shute or hear the name Neville Shute? I guess, again, he was absolutely in the canon, so I suspect we had a town like Alice at home. So I'd seen the name, I knew the name, and then I read that in my 20s and on the beach, which I think are the two that most people have read.

They're the two I'd read. Yeah, and I really enjoyed A Town Like Alice. I didn't love On The Beach, although it's got something. Having reread it, I preferred it than I used to because I think I was expecting something else. And actually now I've reread it. I thought, oh, I see what you're doing, Nev. And then I picked it.

Honestly, if you'd asked me two months ago, I would have gone for Michael Frayn for this podcast. I would have gone for Towards the End of the Morning. But I read Trusty. It's a wonderful book. It's a wonderful book. I read trusty from the tool room uh and you know it's funny as a writer because a bit of you does sometimes have to think what sort of a writer am i yeah you know what example from the past sort of most suits you know who i think i am and i read

this book and i thought well that's the writer I'd like to be. You know, I just thought it was extraordinary and it was extraordinary for very, very unusual reasons. There is not a single sort of show-off bone in this guy's body. This whole book is just, he's literally trying to entertain you. He's got a story to tell you, which I think he weaves very, very beautifully.

He just, it's sort of like an introvert's adventure you know which which which is a beautiful thing and there's no I have a lot of theories about jeopardy which we can get to later and jeopardy and fiction and jeopardy and film uh and in this book is this sort of jeopardy but there also isn't jeopardy you know and there are no the jeopardy isn't where you think it's going to be in the opening couple of chapters. And there are no villains, particularly. And the truth is, everybody wants to help Keith all the way through.

And to weave that into an adventure story, I think is so powerful. And we were talking just now, there's a wonderful motif all the way through this book. So Keith, who is, you know, very poorly paid guy who writes for a miniature modeler, that's his thing, but, you know, can make anything, makes tiny little machines,

but is very, very, very unassuming and genuinely unassuming. So he goes on this incredible odyssey, you know, on the kind of, you know, and it's a 50s odyssey when aeroplanes were incredible odyssey, you know on the kind of you know And it's a 50s odyssey when airplanes were a big deal and you know these big lumber yachts Everywhere he goes in this unassuming way. He'll introduce himself and Every single engineer anyway, it just goes Sorry, you're the Keith Stewart

From miniature modeler. Yeah, and he goes well, I suppose so and so. And he's a huge celebrity among the people who make stuff. And it's just such a joy because you're cheering him on all the way through and just to see who's going to help him now. Yeah, because he is this kind of little pooterish figure, isn't he? He's described early on in the book as having a greasy mac and a floppy hat and slightly overweight and pasty skinned like thousands of men walking through london in 1958 or whenever it whenever it's set it's my we've said this often on this show but it's my belief that all books are in fact books about books right fundamentally they're all books about books and sure? Fundamentally, they're all books about books.

And sure enough, when I started reading Trustee from the Tool Room, I thought, oh, Neville, you don't fool me. A little guy who lives in Ealing, like you did, in your house, like you did, who's working on miniature models. And I thought, because that's a metaphor for the fictional process. It isn't. He liked making miniature models, And I thought, because miniature modelling, that's a metaphor for the fictional process. It isn't. He liked making

miniature models. There's no subtext there. It's about the thing that he's interested in. And one of his theories was, if you write about something that interests you, which he partly explains

some of the strange subject areas he wandered into in the course of his career, which we'll come on to. But if it animates you, you will write better on the page and that will communicate itself to the reader yeah he also says which is true he said look i only have one job and that that's essentially to entertain to tell a story and he says so what i try and do is if i have new information i try and get that across as well yeah and it's fascinating because what he thinks he thinks he's giving us this engineering information

because there's quite detailed bits of engineering in this and about the size of the balls and stuff like that. It's proper fan service. If you're interested, don't you feel at this stage in your careers, I'm going to give the people who are interested in engineering quite a lot of engineering. But the lovely thing is, this is in the 50s. This is just before the world changed forever.

So what you're actually reading is an extraordinary bit of history and it feels you know you watch the repair shop and people love the repair shop because it's people who can make things and do things and he's writing about this guy and so he is you realize trying to give you modern technological information to his reader yeah but we're reading it 70 years later and we're reading this incredible portrait of a lost age because the writing is so beautiful. I'll sit and read that stuff and imagine his workshop.

They talk about all the different machines he's got. It's lovely. You know when authors write about flowers? They go, I was walking down the road in this Hollyhocks and they go, I don't care. I genuinely don't care. But there's a thing. I'll read a tiny bit here. And'll go, I was walking down the road in this Hollyhocks and they'll go, I don't care. I genuinely don't care. But there's a thing, I'll read a tiny bit here and he says

he called the front basement room his clean working room and this was his machine shop. He had a six inch Herbert lathe for heavy work, a three and a half inch Miford and a Bowley watchmaker's lathe. He had a senior milling machine and a Boxford shaper, a large and small drill press,

and a vast array of tools ready to hand. And you just think, great. I mean, that's like, I don't know what any of those things are, but I can, you know, I'm back there in the 50s. But we were saying earlier, weren't we, the thing that I find so interesting about Neville Shue, you know, an aeronautic engineer, tremendously interested in detail.

Covers a very peculiar range of topics in the course of his novels. He's something I absolutely love when I find a writer like this. These books shouldn't work. Oh, my God. I've studied the rules. Absolutely shouldn't. These shouldn't work. He's an engineer. Books don't work.

And yet, the storytelling is gripping they command huge audiences or rather commanded huge audiences in their day why what what is i think we'll come back to this so let's ask it for the first time yes what's at the heart of a neville shoot novel what is the thing what is the yeah it's a kernel it's it's a terrific question. And I think it's a genuine love for an underdog. And if you can write with a genuine love for an underdog, rather than, oh, I've created an underdog character who I think the audience are going to like. I think he has genuine respect for this character,

and we have genuine respect for the character. And that's the case in lots of his novels. The slightly kind of unseen person, the slightly kind of overlooked person, changes the world in one way or another. An ordinary person does an extraordinary thing. Yes, which is such a trope. But if you write it from your heart, you know, then that's great.

If you're a literary novelist saying, oh, I'm going to do a thing now about an ordinary person doing something extraordinary, you think, well, no, because your brain is not ordinary. Your heart is not ordinary. Whereas Shute's brain, his writing brain is very ordinary. His heart is clearly very ordinary. And he's just a great kind of prose stylist as well in his own way.

So I think it's that. He writes stories that no one else is writing, which I think is interesting. And he writes them in a way, as you say, he doesn't respect any of the rules. That's why I talk about Jeopardy. He doesn't do the thing of saying, oh my God, what's going to happen next?

He just has a different rhythm. And trustee, this book, it shouldn't work because he basically tells you what the plot of the novel, there's literally no surprise as to how the plot of the novel unfolds. What he makes you interested in is, it's like an engineering problem, isn't it? Is, hmm, Jules on the other side of the world. I have no money. How am I going to get there?

And the answer is through being yourself, through being kind of quite brave and pushing your limits and asking people for help. And then in finding yourself in ridiculously, you know, outlandish situations that you're ill equipped for. I particularly there's just a I love that his wife says it's going to be quite hot. You must take your cricket blazer and flannels. I mean, the great joy of the book is his observation is so precise in each of the locations, whether he's on an aeroplane or he's in a ship, all the kind of detail is amazing. And it's fascinating because he will describe the technical detail and you realise that he's using the language he can understand

but you can fill in the gaps around him, which is he's in this extraordinary place and so he's got stuff to focus on. They go from the snows of refuelling the aircraft in Vancouver down to the boiling sunshine and he's always the same. He's seeking out the engineer both places There's a couple of things I'd like to throw in here, the first thing is in the light of what we've just been saying

this is what Schutt himself said about what he felt were the criteria for a good novel I think that the contents of a book are far more important than the style, an author should write as well as he is able to because one of his jobs I think that the contents of a book are far more important than the style. An author should write as well as he is able to,

because one of his jobs is to make his book easy to read. Oh, lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no book will be successful, however good the writing, if the contents are trivial and not worth reading. It's pretty, pretty, pretty stern stuff. That's a manifesto. For this reason, it has always seemed to me to be important to go to great lengths to find new material,

to search for new facts and for new ideas to present to the reader in the fiction form. An author should know something of the world outside the bedroom if his book is to be useful. Useful is the word at the end there, right? Interesting, by the way you said bedroom rather than outside the front room was it sounds like he's responding to a very specific question yes perhaps perhaps so i the thing but the thing i would like to say in relation to that

which actually massively um increased my respect for this particular novel is that he writes this novel at the end of his life when, to all intents and purposes, after his unhappiness at the circumstances of the filming of his novel On the Beach, he has a stroke. And he writes this novel in the last year of his life.

He is not quite bedridden, in fact, but not far off. He has only written about 20% of it when he falls ill. So he has to do two things. Those descriptions, he can't travel. Yeah. So he has to ask people from these places in the world to send him as many postcards, photograph descriptions as they can.

So he feels on top of it. And the second thing is he dictated most of it. Oh, really? Did you know that? No. He dictated it into a tape machine and then worked off the typed-up proofs. Yeah.

And that really, I mean, that's not a fun way to compose a novel. I mean, there's no fun way to compose a novel but that's a that's a particularly unfun one yeah he's there's a brilliant bit where he's in in slide rule his autobiography where he says when he gets a typewriter that's what enables him to write fiction he said i think most people start off writing poetry and i started doing that and then realized i wasn't very good at that he said but I found writing, the physical act of writing quite difficult. But once I got a typewriter, he said, that was it. I kind of could just...

Also, it's a gadget, isn't it, a typewriter? And he loves, exactly, he loves a machine. So why don't we, Richard, I might ask you about your routine in a moment, but let's hear Neville Shute's daughter, Heather, describing her father's writing routine. He was a very, very methodical man. He would always get up around 7.30, have breakfast at 8.15. Then about nine o'clock he would disappear into his study and he would stay there until one o'clock,

something like that. We lived on a farm in Australia, a couple of hundred acres. And he just loved to get along out onto the farm. And he'd just go and see that everything was doing all right, that the cattle were fine. And so were the pigs. He used to love to go and watch the pigs. Now, John, we've got Croydon and we've got Pig yeah I know but don't you love that he was

that writing was just one of the things that he did he didn't make it his defining thing well he was slightly ashamed of being a novelist well he said

if people ask me what I am I'm an engineer that's what I'm that's what I try to be and he was a serious engineer I mean I mean he was a real deal but he also believed

that he had to the reason why he's got the name Neville Shute is he doesn't want his career as an engineer to be compromised by people finding out he's a best-selling novelist. So his full name was Neville Shute Norwell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Richard, do you have a routine?

Yeah, well, I sort of do i'll i'll write for like two hours at a time that's about as far as my brain would allow but in that too i'm not a procrastinator the second i start my fingers won't leave the keyboard and two hours later uh you know i'll be done but i won't look at the internet i won't you know yeah have the phone but i try and write i've quite short chapters just because my attention span is quite short so i try and write. I've got short chapters just because my attention span is quite short. So I try and write a chapter every day. That's what I try and do, just so I've got a beginning and a middle and an end to what I'm doing. And, sorry, it's such a basic question, but it's fascinating you say that.

If you write at that rate, do you know exactly where you're going? Or do you try and leave some leeway in so you can allow some energy in? It's all leeway, yeah. So I have a rough idea of where I might be headed and I know what the next three scenes I'm going to write are. But, yeah, halfway through one chapter, someone will walk in and I'll go, oh, OK, my story has changed.

Otherwise I'd be so bored if I knew where I was going all the time. It's what Lister Evans describes as you mustn't overplan because otherwise you're just colouring in between the lines. Well, I think so, which I get for some people works, right? And listen, it's really hard to write a book, so whatever works for you, you must do. But, yeah, for me, I have to, you know, the characters aren't real if they don't have a bit of agency.

And, you know, to allow them agency, I can't have decided what's going to happen to them. You know, they have to have a bit of agency. And, you know, to allow them agency, I can't have decided what's going to happen to them. You know, they have to have some hand in that. Well, in a twist at this point, walking into the room is a word from our sponsors. So let's listen to that. So we were just talking about routines and Neville's routine, pre-pig routine.

So the background to this is we should talk about his extraordinary work on the airship, the R-100. Yeah, amazing. He's doing that. And then, while all this was going on, I was writing my second published novel in the evenings, so disdained. Again, I seem to have taken considerable pains over it.

It took me two years to write and all of it was written through twice over, some of it three times. I used to find that the story became fixed in the first writing. I do not think I ever altered a scene or the essentials of a piece of dialogue in a subsequent writing. A rewriting increased the length by about 10%. I love the precision. Awkward phrases and sentences were eliminated and the general style of the writing was improved. Since the first writing probably took a year, one came to the chapter fresh in the rewriting, a year older, with a year passed in which one had forgotten much of the detail.

This undoubtedly helped in putting the thing into a better style. This great amount of rewriting does not seem to me necessary now. This is writing in 1954. With increasing experience, I find that I can say pretty well what I want to say the first time. Perhaps 30% of my later books have been rewritten. I rewrite the first chapter always as a matter of principle, since it is seldom in tune with the rest of the book. Good, good, good. I do not seem to get into my stride

until the first chapter is over. Love it. Do you know what? As I write for myself, I love Neville Shoots. I know. Writing books, as you say, is really hard and is often the agony is much more to the fore than Neville suggests it might be. Also, that thing, you know, his daughter saying you say is really hard and is often the agony is much more to the the four than it's the neville

suggests it might be also that thing you know his daughter saying he'd like to go and look at the pigs and the cattle and he had lots of projects on the go and then he was making his little machines and he was you know running businesses it's it's a very odd autobiography slide rule because it only goes up to kind of you know it's really before he's famous as a writer. But the precision with which he kind of writes about the jobs that he's done and also the big crisis, I think, in his life, other than his brother dying in the trenches, which I think was a huge problem.

He was very close to his brother. A bit like you, Richard, his brother was the literary one. Yes. You know, oh, Fred would have written something. Fred would have written something really great. That would have been much better, yeah. Well, actually, Richard, you said when you chose this, you said that your brother Matt, you'd said to him,

I've just read this great book, Trustee from the Tool Room. It's about this blah, blah, blah. And he said to you, let's give recognition to the sort of thing only an elder brother can do. He said to you, yeah, give recognition to the sort of thing only an elder brother can do. He said to you, yeah, I can see why you'd like that. When I read the book, I was thinking, what did Matt mean? What is the element that he sees? I think he sees a book about a small-town suburban hero

and about the glory of ordinariness and the glory of sort of middle Britishness and, you know, a book that doesn't, you know, particularly spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of evil but thinks about the nature of goodness and thinks about... Yes, that's very true. Yes. Yeah, I've got a theory which I can't prove,

but he's writing this book at the end of his life and it is a bit different. As you say, there's no villains, there's no real plot other than is he going to get the diamonds or isn't he? And actually the way he gets the diamonds is quite ingenious in the end. But as I say, after his brother, the second massive thing in his life is the working on the R100 airship. Yeah.

And at the same time as the government are building another airship, the R101, and the R101 are famously on its maiden kind of flight with the Minister of Air on board and 48 other people are killed. And this was obviously deeply traumatic to shoot because of the minister of air on board and 48 other people are killed and this was obviously deeply traumatic to to to shoot because of the loss of life but also because he felt some somehow this idea of state-run enterprise versus private entrepreneurship that's kind of completely then fixes his view about about life and my theory about this book is that it's a bit like the r100 it's a

group of people all helping one another yeah with minimal resources to achieve something that when it all comes together it comes together well i think kind of beautifully i think yeah it's fascinating it's his last book because what you get in this is Keith, a character who doesn't ask for much and doesn't get much, but is very exacting in what he does, is very precise in what he does, does things the right way if you're an engineer, and finds himself in a position where all of those things are suddenly recognised, understood,

and all of those things pay off, and all of those things suddenly do bring him financial reward and all sorts of things. So I think it's saying, if you live your life the right way, if you live your life by the right measurements and you're exacting and precise, then wouldn't it be lovely if that paid off? And it's sort of a fantasy.

Sort of a fairy tale. Yes. Well, I've got the first edition of this, trustee from the two-room here, and i will read you the jacket copy before i do that do you write your own blurbs richard or do you to the publisher write them for you the publishers write them and then i rewrite them yes i go into them and say i wonder if i wonder if we might not lead with that i wonder if this might be slightly better for us. Okay, so let's assume that perhaps... Well, we don't know, do we?

We don't know if Neville Shute will have signed the top or not. He had this terrible problem with titles. Tell me about it. This is a terrible title. But he was always being told... He's a terrible title. He was always being told that his titles were shit. Was he?

Was he? And sometimes they won and sometimes he won. But the book's still sold, isn't it? On the beach for something that's called The Legacy in America. Okay, so this is the blurb from Trusty from the Two Room. Two terrible

nouns, trustee and two room. Keith Stewart's life resembled that of thousands of other Englishmen. He lived in Ealing, he was happily married. He worked hard for a small salary. He had a mortgage to pay off. And he was a contented man.

In his house, he had fixed up a model engineering workshop. And through his contributions to the miniature mechanic, he was known, as his daily post proved, to enthusiasts all over the world. It doesn't matter what way you approach this, Bert. Is this the blurb? Yes, this is the blurb? Who's picking this up? Bring it on. Come on. One day, the tramlines of Keith

Stewart's life were torn up. He woke up to find that he had become the trustee of his ten-year-old niece, and that he was committed to a wild quest for a cash which his own ingenuity had helped to hide. OK, that bit's good.

Yeah. Suddenly, don't lead with that. Cut out the entire first paragraph. Yeah. We've never actually critiqued live as we go. All right, I'll throw you another bit. He began in deep waters. OK.

Bit of a metaphor. On a 2,000-mile voyage across the Pacific in a small yacht with one companion, and a very strange one at that, and he ended in high altitudes, among the top echelons of American big business. There's a funny tense going on there, isn't there? He started... He began in deep waters and he ended in high altitudes.

It's not elegant, is it? Keith Stewart's happiest discovery, apart from what he set out to find, so it's giving you the ending, that's good, was that he had more friends in the world than he knew about. Now, wait, wait, wait. Neville Shute's new book is on a theme dear to his heart,

the ordeal of an ordinary man plunged into extraordinary circumstances and emerging with his personal values unshaken. Trustee from the tool room is a splendid story whose sense of adventure and the power of friendship make it the happiest

as well as the last of Neville Shoots novels. That is a sting in the tail. I just want to say on the back of this book are quotes from On the Beach, the very first of which, do you know this? No, I don't.

Okay, the first quote they've put on here from the Daily Telegraph is this, Neville Shute's new novel is a quietly and deliberately terrible book. But by which they mean it's about a terrible subject. Those 60s marketing departments, how we love them. So I agree, but here's the thing. What the blurb should say, nothing more except,

public, you like Neville's shoot, here's a book by him. Oh, you're going to love it. Because it is a splendid story. That absolutely sums to love it. Because it is a splendid story. That absolutely sums it up. I think it is a splendid story. It is a splendid story. And it is about the power of friendship. And, you know, that's lovely.

Let's leave it with that. And I say his kind of, his compulsive need to describe things, not in a, you know, in, yes, detail, but in a very, you know, you're never at sea. What was Fadiman saying about the lack of literary whatever? There's no filigree in this book at all. He's a very, I think he's a really marvellous writer. Well, he's fascinating because he's

very, very left-brained, right? Very left-brained, but he has, he obviously has extreme compassion for human beings as well, and it's quite a rare combination so he writes within the constraints of the left brain but he cannot help but let compassion into it There are so many things

he could have done differently in the book. I love the Jack Donnelly character and that thing of him continually being fascinated by the smallest in the world, the little tiny petrol engine It's very interesting being fascinated by, smallest in the world, the little tiny petrol engine. He just keeps...

It's very interesting reading the reviews from the time of this book. They're mostly... They tend to dam with faint praise. Yeah. There's a... John, there's a fantastic review, which I don't have, unfortunately.

But if anyone goes online and you look up the Telegraph's review of Trusty from the Tool Room by Neville Shute, it's done in a roundup with other fiction published the same week, alongside The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett. No, God. Which is one of the books we talked about on the last episode. They were exactly contemporaneous. If you had the fiction round at that point,

you could get trusty from the tool room in the same week as Samuel Beckett and try and find some common ground between them. And he does. He does. He says, well, no, actually, John, he says, you know, Neville Shute does what Neville Shute always did, which is give you detail, give you a belief in human beings.

Yeah. And Samuel Beckett gives you a man who says he's going to go on and doesn't go on, but then he does go on. You know, it's like... There is in that slightly, as I say, that watching Keith Stewart kind of shambling down Ealing High Street, there is a sort of like a Beckettian tramp element to him. He just, in the end, all he's got is his, what did it say?

His excellent values. His excellent values. Now, we should say about Neville Shute as well, that Neville was rather of the right. Yes. One of his novels, I've got a copy here, is called In the Wet, and this was published in 1954. It was published after Shute left the UK, emigrated for Australia because he was so appalled

at the Clement Attlee government. Getting in again. He said, if I moved, if Attlee gets in again, I'm moving to Australia. He loved Australia. The old Andrew Lloyd Webber kind of thing of if they get in. He was very cross about taxation. Well, it's fascinating that a large part of the plot of this

book is about... It's tax dodging. Yeah. It's about not being able to take a lot of English money into foreign territories. And that's sort of why I'm going to write a book about that. You always think, what's the inciting incident for a book? Whenever I read a book

you think, what was the idea where they've gone, okay, okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm almost certain it's like, I wish I could have taken more money into Australia. How could I have done that? And then everything spins out of this. Spoiler alert, but he gets away with it.

But then the shoot would say that it's a classic... Stupid law. It's a classic personal integrity versus bureaucratic idiocy. Natural justice. So, in the wet, this novel that was published in 1953, shortly after he arrived in Australia, is... I don't know if either of you have read this. No, I haven't.

It sounds like a follow-up to On the Beach. It sounds like you've got off the beach and into the sea. It's a book about a man who in the 19th century is injured and is given opium as a palliative and during an opium dream is transported forwards to the 1980s where he discovers that Britain is, after a long period of austerity, imposed by a socialist government, is on its knees. Wow.

And so it's a kind of William Morris news from nowhere. But instead of going to the future and discovering it's a sort of workers' collective, it's the opposite. He goes and discovers that the workers' collective has ruined. People don't like the Queen anymore in the West. It's really... But this is what I mean, Richard. There's some unusual stuff he writes about. Right, absolutely.

But he was born in 1899. So he was like... His childhood was this extraordinary Edwardian kind of middle-class childhood. And then, you know, you can see the war coming towards you. And beyond even the war, his dad was put in charge of the Irish post office in Dublin. And the young Neville Shute is a stretcher bearer.

He watches the Easter Rising, watches soldiers being shot dead in front of him, and it distinguishes himself as a stretcher bearer. Very extraordinary breadth of experience for somebody from Ealing. It's amazing how authors, the biographies of authors who were writing in the sort of early part of the last century are very different to the biography of authors now.

You know, like no one's ever done anything. And then worked in marketing for Procter & Gamble for four years before their first novel was published. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Richard, I'm going to ask you to read, if you would be so good, the scene... We've talked a lot about lathes and workshops and eeling, but the thing about Neville's shoot is,

in all of the books of his that I've read, when he wants to, as it were, put his foot on the accelerator or take off, he can really do it. Yeah, he really can. He's a great writer of action. The action sequence here. Amazing.

So where are we at this point? So this is the brother-in-law and the wife are travelling to Vancouver and they're travelling via various places, just been to Tahiti. And by the way, so this is the brother-in-law and the wife are travelling to Vancouver and they're travelling via various places, just been to Tahiti. And by the way, so this is an action sequence. This follows about, I'm going to say like a 10-page digression about how one navigates in a small craft across various places.

You get the full lesson. You get the full thing, but actually quite interesting. Amazing. Absolutely. But then, yeah. About the middle of the morning, something in the water ahead drew John's attention. He gave the helm to Jo, Jo is the wife, and stood up against the companion,

the wind tearing at his clothing, lashed by the spray. Visibility was between one and two miles. There was something different half a mile or so ahead of him. The backs of the sea looked different in some way. Then, over to the left a little, in a quick passing glimpse, he saw what looked like the tops of palm trees above the waves. He turned with a heavy heart and went back to his wife. There seems to be an island dead ahead, he shouted. I think we're driving down onto a reef. She nodded. She was now past caring. He took her hand. I'm sorry about this, Joe. She smiled at him. It doesn't matter.

Can you take her a bit longer? He asked. I want to see if we can dodge it. She nodded and he stood up again by the companion. It was clearer now, for they were closer. What he had seen were the backs of the great comas breaking on a coral reef. The line of different surf extended both on port and starboard hands as far as he could see. He searched desperately for a break in the surf, something to indicate a passage through the reef into the shelter lagoon

that might lie beyond. If there were any break he would try and steer her off and run in through it, even though they might be overwhelmed in the process. He could see no break at all. It all just looked the same on either band as far as he could see. There was no escape for them now. Shearwater, that's the boat, was driving straight onto a coral reef in the Teutomos somewhere, and would leave her bones upon the coral, as many a tall ship had done before. He had not the remotest idea where they were. He came back to her and took the helm. In bad moments in the last forty-eight hours he had imagined this situation and had thought it out. Better to take the coral straight, head on, than to be thrown onto their beam ends, to have the hull crushed like an eggshell by the fury of the waves. Better to take it head on, taking the shock on the lead keel and trying

to keep stern onto the seas. Reefs were seldom uniform in height. If they had the luck to strike a fissure, a patch wherein calm water the coral was a couple of feet or more below the surface, they might possibly be driven over it onto the lagoon and still float and live. He bent to explain this to his wife. I want you to go below, he shouted. When we strike, stay in the hull. She'll probably get full of water, but stay in the hull. Just keep your head above the water, but stay inside. She shouted, what are you going to do? I'm going to stay up here and steer her on. I'll join you down below as soon as she strikes. It's our best chance.

I don't think she'll break up. If she breaks up, she'll stay on the reef, won't she? He knew what was in her mind. The keel wheel and probably the frames. He paused and then leaned across and kissed her. Now go below. I'm sorry I've got you into this. She kissed him in return.

It's not your fault. She stood up, waited her chance, opened the hatch and slipped down below, leaving it open for him to follow her. She sat down on one of the settees, the first aid box in her hands. There were now only a few minutes to go. She thought she ought to say a prayer, but it seemed mean to have neglected God and her religion for so long and then to pray when death was imminent.

The words would not come. She could only think of Janice. Janice, whose future happiness laid buried in the words would not come. She could only think of Janice. Janice, whose future happiness laid buried in the concrete beneath her feet. The concrete would survive upon the coral reef, but no one would ever know of it but Keith. Keith, who had never made much of his life. Keith, who had never been anywhere or done anything. Keith, to whose keeping she had trusted Janice. From the cockpit, John Dermot shouted above the screaming of the wind, Next one, Joe! In those last moments, the power of prayer came to her,

and she muttered in the accents of her childhood, Lord, gekeeth a bit of good sense. Then they struck. Master storyteller. That's what I'm saying. She's not mucking about. I think one of the things about that, Richard, actually, that occurred to me while you were reading, and it was wonderful, by the way,

the thing about Neville Shute's novels, and some that has in common with your novels, is people die. There are stakes. Yeah. So we've talked about it being quite whimsical, but actually, if you look at A Town Like Alice, that's a novel of the barbarity of man to man,

woman to man, man to child, trustee from the tool room. It kills them off there in a kind of methodical way. And on the beach, everybody dies. But honestly, the thing about it is, and I think this a lot when I'm writing, he talks about it but he doesn't bang on about it. No. You know, he sort of writes about it,

and then he'll write about the lathe and write about them in the same measured tone because that's how life is. That's one of the great things about A Town Like Alice, I think, is the suffering of the women, which is, you know, half of them die. Rereading A Town Like Alice. Yes.

The child dies when it's bitten by a snake. And I remember reading that thinking, oh, they'll suck the venom out. They don't. It didn't work. Or rather, if they do, it doesn't work. You know, so as you say, Richard, the idea that life can end suddenly,

like an exploding airship, say, which, you know, there is that sense that having lived through wars or disasters or conflict... Losing a brother very early on. Yeah. The story goes on. I just feel a couple of things about the Tory thing, definitely. But he is very...

It's the old-school, small, you know, it's the kind of... It's the old-fashioned kind of one-nation Tory thing. He likes an entrepreneur. Yeah nation glory thing that he likes an entrepreneur and he likes you know and he likes a bit of he likes a bit of swashbuckle he likes a bit of risk taking you know he's not but i think he i think he is um and also you know you think about this book he he gets some some uh he gets some jip about his his women characters but actually in all the books in this book kat Katie the wife is actually the one who does all the accounts and does the work.

And even in the kind of representation of, you know, there are two important Jewish characters in the book. Absolutely. Jack Donnelly is half Polynesian and gets the girl. Yeah. I mean, I've just been reading a lot of Golden Age crime for a thing. And so I was slightly worried reading this book. But actually for the day, it's not i was slightly worried reading this book but actually for the for the for the day it's not it's extraordinary terrible can i can i read a

betchamon quote about neville shoot which goes to this sort of tauriness yeah of it i always say you try and judge people by their um by their motives not by their opinions and so that's very good uh so betchamon uh concluded uhville Shute does not sound priggish or false because he is obviously sincere. He is not a self-styled plain man with loud, dull opinions. He is humbler than that. He writes because he wants to give us hope. He does not write literature,

but I think he succeeds in his mission. That's great. We'll take that as well, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could we... Let's hear another clip quickly from... This is his daughter Heather again talking about her father and you'll also hear Adam Hart-Davis.

This is from an episode of Great Lives on Radio 4 about 20 years ago. In the evening after dinner, he would go into his little workshop and he would build little engines and things like that. And, of course, all that came out in Trustee from the Toolroom, which was the last book that he wrote. That's fascinating because that's my favourite of all his books. I read that a couple of weeks ago and it's absolutely wonderful. And I noticed that Keith Stewart, his hero, lived in Ealing

and obviously it was very autobiographical. And he describes him as a little man, rather quiet, insignificant, with a greasy raincoat. It's the most charming book of all, I think. And I hadn't realised that your father was a miniature mechanic. He needed all these different things as a sort of a counterpoint to one another. He never, except perhaps at the very end, different things as sort of a counterpoint to one another.

He never, except perhaps at the very end, did he consider himself a writer. He considered himself an engineer most of his life. Now, we should also say one of the things that this quiet, this quiet, unassuming, quirky, individual, engineering man was, by some margin, one of the best-selling writers of the 20th century. And after he died, Trustee from the Tool Room was published two, three months after he died, and at the time, it was a record world record for a first printing in the uk they printed 200 000 copies immediately of the first edition as we said eric the sunday

times bestseller list was in the new york times for five months so the question i want to circle before we wrap up. Why hasn't Neville shoot? I think it is fair to say, why isn't he read now? Yeah, I think it's deeply unfashionable, certainly in literary terms, because what he's doing, as you say, it's splendid and it's charming. But as you said, as Betjeman just said, it's not literature, but what it is has its own merits, right? Exactly, and it feels to me like he's right.

You know, listen, that's what this podcast is all about. It's saying he's gone out of fashion, but he shouldn't have done, because there is incredible merit in this book. I can imagine reading this book and coming at it from a different angle to I did and not enjoying it and kind of going, nothing happens here. But I think if you come at it head on, I think it's an extraordinary work.

And I think if you look at everything that's happened since Neville Shute died in terms of, you know, the literature that sort of was big, the authors who were big, of course he disappeared because what does he have to offer, you know, the 70s and the 80s and the 90s and the noughties? But we're in the 2020s now and the world we're living in feels to me like this book has an awful lot to offer us when it talks about just doing things the right way. And it talks about getting rewarded and it talks about the value of friendship and the value of people supporting each other. Feels to me like that's not a story we've needed for the last 30 or 40 years,

but probably a story we need now. I'll also, I think that's very wise, I'll also add something else, which has been one of the great pleasures of making this podcast, is every so often we chance upon an author or a novel where I think, and I do think Neville Shute is one of these, John,

I'm absolutely enraptured by how weird these books are. Yeah, so weird. These were some of the best-selling novels of the 20th century. Each one is so different from the previous one. Each one is so peculiar in its storytelling method and its subject matter. He is his own genre, right? So I was thinking of so many men thinking of, you know, my grandfather, my uncles, men who did things in sheds, who were interested in machines. These books were

kind of written, I mean, whether they were written for them, they're certainly read by them in their millions. I wonder, where did that market go? Where did those men, Le Carre maybe, Len Dayton, but they're much more, in a way, they're much more generic. I mean, well, I think Le Carre is a great writer, but, you know, it's like there's no one really, after Neville Shute, who writes Neville Shute. You know where they've all gone, don't you?

They've all got podcasts now. They're all making YouTube videos. Speaking of which, you'll be able to see this on YouTube. We've filmed it and everything, so you can see me and John surrounded by our phones and our notes. Wearing a tie. Wearing a tie. Look, nice.

Anyway, all good things come to an end. We're towing this little bicentennial bark into a harbour. Huge thank you to Richard. Thank you. For enrolling us in the International Alliance of Shootists and to Nicky Birch for navigating our little catch across the wide Shootian Ocean. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions

for further reading for this show and the 199 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at batlisted.fm where you'll also find a link to our regular newsletter, which will include things that... pigs that Sergio Mitchinson has met, places in Purley that I recommend and books perhaps that Richard Osman has been reading.

And if you want to buy any of the books, including Richard's and Neville's, please visit our bookshop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. We're still keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Blue Sky. And furthermore, we will be recording a live episode of Batlisted at the Woodstock Poetry Festival in Oxford on Saturday, December the 2nd. It's the Saturday. It's 8pm in the evening, St Mary's Church, Woodstock,

and the subject of the podcast is... Is Basil Bunting's extraordinary poem, Brig Flats. No engineering in it, but it's like the wasteland, only up north. We have the great Neil Astley from Bullabit as guest, and the other guest is McGillivray, a.k.a. Kirsten Norrie, who's a Bloodaxe poet. Go onto the woodstockpoetryfestival.org website and you can buy tickets, and we look forward to seeing you there.

I like to think Neville Shute and Basil Bunting did meet at one point what a thought yeah yeah yeah i mean you couldn't imagine neville taking out one of his little engines and basil bunting becoming quite fascinated by it not the neville shoot right if you want to hear backlisted early and ad free you can subscribe to our patreon www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe at the lot listener level or for rather less than the price of a monthly subscription to Miniature Mechanic,

you'll get not one, but two exclusive extra podcasts every month. We call it Locklisted because it began in the Wenlock Tavern just before lockdown and it features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films and music we've enjoyed the previous fortnight. For those of you who enjoyed our What Have You Been Reading

slot, that's where you'll now find it. Plus, lot listeners get their names read out accompanied by lashings of thanks and gratitude. And because it's episode 200 our guest has agreed on the spot to read out these names. Take it away, Richard.

I might get some of these pronunciations wrong. Don't worry. Diane Sabina. Thank you. Barbara Meaney. Thank you. Michael. Thanks, Michael.

That I can do. Committa Wilde. Thanks, Committa. John Ward. Thank you. Ian Farr. Great. Liz.

Liz. Thank you, Liz. Ada Arduini. Thank you. Christine L. Boatman. Thank you. Very good Ada Arduini. Thank you. Christine L. Boatman. Oh, a shoot name. Best name so far for a novelist. And Janine Nicol.

Wonderful. Thanks so much, everybody. Richard, before we go, is there anything we haven't covered about Neville's shoot or a trustee from the tool room or anything that you would like to add? No, other than i stumbled across this novel and it just made two weeks absolutely fly by and that's the point of this podcast it's why i'm here it's lovely to be here but anyone who reads it i hope that you

love it thank you so much well thanks for joining us today and thanks everyone particularly if this is the 200th episode or the first. Either way, thank you so much. Everyone welcome. And should we do it again in a fortnight? Why don't we? Let's do it again in a fortnight. Thanks very much. Thanks for listening.

Bye, everyone. Bye, everybody. Thank you. Bye. © BF-WATCH TV 2021