Nevil Shute - In the Wet

[bennet_7]

I'm reading Nevil Shute's In the Wet at the moment. I first discovered Shute when my sister was doing a play and I had to help her with her costume changes (horrible experience btw. Amateur theatre is teh suckitude). I spent a lot of time just hanging around back stage, bored out of my mind.

So I picked up one of the props (it was supposed to be a school book) which was a copy of Shute's The Mysterious Aviator (originally published as So Disdained). I really enjoyed it and soon read A Town like Alice, for which I had already seen the movie adaption and was suprised to discover that they'd only made the first half of the book into a film! I found the second half of the book equally interesting but it's not terribly cinematic ;-)

A friend of the family had given me In the Wet a while ago but I haven't had time to read it until now. So far I'm really liking it.

The thing I love most is his imagery. He paints such a vivid portrait of the Australian landscape - when I read I can almost taste the dust in my mouth (in the outback dust gets every where and there's not a lot you can do about it) and feel the oppressive heat on my back. It's excellent stuff.

His main character, a priest named Roger Hargreaves, narrates the story in a very intimate way. I often have problems with stories told from first person perspective but Shute makes it work.

What I do have trouble with in his work is how he refers to Australia's indigenous peoples as 'blacks' or 'half-castes' - it's very...awkward to read that. The novel was published back in 1953 so I'm guessing he's probably just portraying the attitude of 'European' Australians of the time - I don't think he's being rascist per se, but just holds the uneducated and biased opinions that most people were brought up with. It grates on my nerves to read it but I'm not going to let it detract me from enjoying other elements of the story.

Comments

[kaosmalek.livejournal.com]

A lot of author's use derogatory language and generalizations to put you into the actuality of the time period you're reading about. I read a lot of cutting edge western stuff, like Cormac McCarthy and James Carlos Blake, and if I had a penny for every time the N word pops up... well, I'd at least have a fancy new outfit. I'm not a fan of deragatory names, but these books kind of demand them, otherwise the author wouldn't be true to the subject matter.