Pastoral, by Nevil Shute

I read a Nevil Shute book awhile back, the one where everyone dies from radiation, On the Beach.  I thought it was cheap and fearmongering.

Recently someone prompted me to take a second look at his stuff.  He writes extremely competently.  This is middle-brow done right.

There are great books and there are books that are great–for you.  No one would say that a factory-made garment has the quality of a tailored one, but sometimes you find something off the rack that still fits you like it had been adjusted down to the sixteenth of an inch.    Pastoral is the latter  kind of book.  It fit me just right.

I have one of those stormy marriages. We have patches of rough weather and patches of placid seas. But just now for no good reason we have been having one of those intensely romantic interludes, as if beyond the calmer waters were the Western Isles of the Blessed. And then I read Pastoral. It is a romance, basically. And the man and the woman are me and my wife. They have the same spirits that we do. I felt like I was reading about us in another time.

That’s it, that’s the point I wanted to make. Oh, uh, its a book about a RAF WWII bomber pilot flying out of a rural air base. I can add some actual insight, but that is secondary to what really moved me deeply about the book. Here it is: for the thoughtful reader, the book has some very interesting reflections about the collapse of social courtship customs. Not consciously. But its there. You see how much benefited everyone is by a goverment policy that has the side effect of bringing young men and young women together, and the benefit they get from having older people taking a hand in the younger folks’ proceedings.