Reading too many blogs about books has a distinct disadvantage: time and again I am tempted to buy more books. I don’t even remember which blog reminded me of Nevil Shute (sorry for the missing link). I read a few of his novels decades ago, but I didn’t have one in my library.
So, stimulated by someone, I bought an old edition of this book: published by Heinemann in 1951 (it was first printed in 1940). And, to be honest and a little bit ashamed, I devoured it again. One cannot always read Virginia Woolf or Elias Canetti or E.M. Forster. The common reader needs some perspective. He wants to be reminded why he likes James Joyce and Max Frisch so much. And this perspective is the finest excuse to read a good read.
Nevil Shute certainly knew how to tell a story, although it seems too easy to predict what is coming, but I believe that is part of the fun. Because this kind of literature might be called wysiwyg-literature: what you surmise is what you get. From time to time I like to submerge in this kind of pastime, reading CS Forester’s (Hornblower) or Simenon or John Le Carré.
An Old Captivity is a combination of an adventure and a love story. The protagonists are an unworldly Oxford don (archaeologist) and his unworldly daughter (she plays the violin and Beethoven) and on the other hand a very healthy young man, pilot of seaplanes, adventurer.
The don wants to do research in a remote place in Greenland and hires the pilot. Neither the don, nor his daughter — in their naive outlook — have any idea of the difficulties for such an enterprise. The pilot, on the other hand, has a lot of experience flying in the North but he is thwarted by the daughter, aloof and with the making of spinster. Eventually the daughter accompanies her father on the trip and learns to appreciate the technical abilities of the pilot, his foresight, his workmanship, etc.
It is a love novel, but I believe that Shute is in love with the pilot (self-portrait?). The girl comes round to admire the pilot’s world, but the pilot doesn’t have to learn to appreciate Bach or literature. It rather makes me think of CP Snow’s The Two Cultures, here not the split between science and art, rather technique and art.
The protagonists are merely cardboard personages, certainly the young woman, who almost seems a caricature like Bianca Castafiore in Hergé’s strips. Nevertheles, I loved to read it again.
Nevil Shute: An Old Captivity