I suspect that many of my generation were denied the possibility of much interest in the books of Nevil Shute by being forced to read ‘A Town Like Alice’ in high school. I remember very little of the book now of course but nevertheless can recall finding it insufferably dull at the time. It is almost certain that our English teacher would have tried to sell it to us boys as being partially set in WW2, and no doubt to the girls in the class as being a romance. To someone who was otherwise devouring ‘Commando’ comic books, however, the war angle in ‘A Town Called Alice’ was, I am quite sure, something of a disappointment. As for romance? Well, I mean to say…

It seems fairly certain that ‘A Town Like Alice’ (again, my particular age means I keep typing ‘CALLED’ rather than ‘Like’) would have fallen off the curriculum not long after we were made to read it at the tail end of the 1970s, but in retrospect I rather wonder if I was not rather fortunate that such books and authors were still being taught in Scottish high schools at all. For whilst there was, as I have noted previously, something of a tendency towards snootiness at many books being ‘An English Thing’, at least we still studied Shakespeare and I will forever be grateful to my English teacher for introducing me to Salinger and Golding, even if I did not investigate either author further until several years afterwards. These days I am given to understand (through admittedly anecdotal evidence) that the ‘English’ curriculum in Scotland is entirely given over to native writers. Certainly there are many Scottish authors whose work would be as worthy of pushing on reluctant teenagers as Nevil Shute once was, but still…

Some forty five years after that enforced reading of ‘A Town Like Alice’ my ignorance of Shute’s work would no doubt have continued were it not for the intervention of Mark Brend, who incidentally has a book about David Ackles coming out soon that I am looking forward to reading. Shute, he suggests, is a great ‘forgotten’ writer of the post-war period, one of those authors whose books were enormously successful in their time but have since rather fallen out of fashion. Now as you may be aware I find this kind of thing intriguing, for there is something about exploring the forgotten mainstream that feels much more appealing than continuing to scrabble around for the forgotten fragments of the peripheries. Sometimes I suspect it is just my present self being pointedly dismissive about the ghosts of my younger selves, for whom the very thought of the Popular or Mainstream would be abhorrent. This would, I think, be quite an amusing attitude to take in itself, yet there is also, I suspect, something stronger at work, which is an attempt in some way to see if one’s received perception of the mainstream from any given time period is correct. Are there surprises to be found? Can one’s prejudices towards eras be challenged?

Nevil Shute’s 1955 novel ‘Requiem for a Wren’, as recommended by Mark, is certainly a surprise and, read some seventy years later, does indeed perhaps puncture some of one’s perceptions of the era. It is in some respects a kind of multi-modal text, blending as it does straightforward first person narrative with extracts from letters, diary entries, and documented interviews/conversations. Early in the book Shute makes a delightful nod to mystery writing when the novel’s primary narrator Alan Duncan reflects on the apparent suicide of his parents’ housekeeper, saying that “The thought of murder crossed my mind, of course, and I put it out of my head. We read too many detective stories, which set one off upon the most unlikely trains of thought.” This feels a little like Shute both taking a light dig at the detective story genre yet also setting us up for the fact that in many ways ‘Requiem for a Wren’ is exactly that; a detective story. The mystery in this case is not so much solving any ‘crime’, but the painstaking work involved in uncovering backstories. Looking for motive. Seeking out meaning. Searching for solace.

In some respects ‘A Requiem for a Wren’ feels like a thoroughly modern book with some themes that ought to reverberate in 2025. There is much about mental health, with the beginnings of an exploration into what we would now recognise as PTSD, and there is much that is timeless such as the exploration of loss, guilt, love and loneliness. Shute does not shy from these themes, but there is none of what I feel is too often the self-obsessed hyperbolic drama approach to such themes that one finds in the 21st Century. Instead Shute typically explores the issues in a manner which is quite pragmatic (as perhaps befits an engineer) yet also oddly sensitive. It could be suggested that such an approach is itself informed by those qualities instilled by living through and being involved in war, and whilst this kind of feeling permeates much immediate post-war writing and on into the 1950s, rarely have I seen the lasting effects of the trauma expressed so bluntly. This comes across most strongly in a set-piece where Alan Duncan has a conversation/interview with Viola Dawson, another former Wren, in her early ‘50s London flat (“such a place as any working girl in a good job might live in, decent but not affluent.”) Dawson is, in modern parlance, working out her PTSD in paintings of motor torpedo boats and the like. “I’m beginning to get it out of my system now.” She says, before admitting that “It seemed so much the normal way of life after the war that one didn’t do anything about it. And then one day I woke up—we all woke up—and had to realise that it had all been quite unusual; it would never come again. Not for us, not in our lifetime. We should be too old, or married—out of it. And then I felt I had to work and work and put it all down on canvas, everything I’d seen, before I forgot what it was like.” Dawson pauses for a moment at this point but continues her painting before adding that “It’s very hard to realise that it will never come again. To realise we’ve had it.” (My emphasis).

This almost fond nostalgia for the upheaval of war feels like quite a startling admission to 21st Century eyes and I imagine it might have felt a little uncomfortable to many even in 1955, perhaps because it dared to admit something that would have been encouraged to keep hidden. Certainly Shute nods towards this when he has her add, later in the conversation that “Until we’re dead, we Service people, the world will always be in danger of another war. We had too good a time in the last one. We’ll none of us come out into the open and admit it.” (Again my emphasis). Dawson is clearly quite a damaged character, and Shute sketches her with a sensitivity that captures both her strength and vulnerability. She’s a remarkably perceptive character too, reflecting that “For our generation, the war years were the best time of our lives, not because they were war years but because we were young. The best years of our lives happened to be war years. Everyone looks back at the time when they were in their early twenties with nostalgia, but when we look back we only see the war. We had a fine time then, and so we think that if a third war came we’d have those happy, carefree years all over again.”

This conversation between Viola Dawson and Alan Duncan does feel like the most significant point in the book, one around which things pivot and in which the most painful truths begin to be laid bare. From this point ‘Requiem for a Wren’ begins to rely more heavily on letters and diary entries, pulling the past of wartime England into the early 1950s present of a farming estate in Victoria, Australia. On reading these Shute has Duncan reflect that “even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus”, that “Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over.”

This might make ‘Requiem for a Wren’ sound rather gloomy and depressing. In some respects of course it is, but there is too ultimately a sense of emerging out of darkness into light. For even as the ghosts of lost loves emerge from the wartime narrative they present not just sorrow but also possibility. At the novel’s conclusion, as the dawn both physically and metaphorically creeps into the room in which he has been reading and reflecting, Alan Duncan notes that “Only cowards run away because they are afraid of ghosts.”