It's interesting to re-read a book after a long time, and see whether your opinion of it has changed. I first read [authoer:Aldous Huxley]'s Brave New World when I was about 17, and found it very exciting and stimulating. I re-read it when I was 57, and after 40 years found it rather flat and dull. I've just finished reading No Highway after a gap of about 60 years, and found it as good as when I first read it. It was interesting to see what I remembered and what I had forgotten. I was about 13 or 14 when I first read it, when I was still crazy about aeroplanes and wanted to be a pilot. By the time I was 15 my ambitions had dropped, and my main interest was cars. From the age of 11 to 14 most of what I read had something to do with aeroplanes, and if No Highway had not been about aeroplanes I would probably not have read it at all.When I first read the book the most memorable things were the technical bits to do with the aircraft. I could recall the love story vaguely, but I could not recall the British Israelite angle at all, though it is quite prominent in the story, though I did recall the part with the planchette. I read it about the time that the first commercial jets, the De Havilland Comets, were in the news because of unexplained crashes. I seem to recall that when it was determined that the cause of the crashes was metal fatigue I knew what that meant because it was central to the plot of No Highway but it is possible that it was the other way round -- that I understood the point of the plot because of the real-life incidents with the Comets.It was the first book by Nevil Shute that I had read, and because I had enjoyed it I went on to read others written by him, though I still thought (and after re-reading it still think) )that No Highway was one of his best. I think it has aged well. Of course, one is aware that it belongs to its time, and that many things have changed since then. On the technical side the most obvious thing is air navigation. Back then the cabin crews were small (because the planes were smaller and carried fewer passengers) but the flight-deck crew was large, including, in addition to two pilots, a flight engineer, a navigator and a wireless operator. Advances in electronics have made the last two redundant. Social attitudes too are different. One of the most noticeable is that sex has replaces smoking as one of the most commonly-described recreational activities. Another is that sex roles were much more rigid back then: males were useless at cooking and cleaning and buying clothes for children; females were useless at research and design. I find the social differences interesting too, because I'm also reading a historical novel, Dissolution by C.J. Sansom. When reading historical novels I always have one eye out for anachronisms, things that the author gets wrong about the period in which the novel is set. No Highway is set in our past, but it was contemporary when it was written. So when I first read it, it was much closer to the time in which it was set and I did not notice such things, but the second time around, it gives an authentic view of a vanished past. Give it another 60 years, and some things in the book may need to be annotated, because there will then be no one around who lived thourgh that period. But I thought it was a good read back then, and it's still a good read now, and probably will be in 60 years' time too,
No Highway builds an absorbing, suspenseful story around the unlikely basis of scientific research—which takes on a much stronger immediacy when it casts doubt on the safety of an airplane. The trouble is, the theory suggesting the aircraft are unsafe comes from Theodore Honey, an untidy, eccentric scientist whom few take seriously. One of his superiors, the book's narrator Dennis Scott, believes he may be right, but convincing higher officials poses a difficult problem. When Honey is sent to Canada to investigate the wreckage of one of the aircraft which crashed, he finds that the plane on which he is traveling is near the possible danger point and tries to have it grounded. The aftermath of this incident, Honey's relationships with a stewardess and a fellow-passenger he met on the threatened plane, and the involvement of the narrator and his wife with Honey and his motherless young daughter Elspeth, form the rest of the plot.I read this novel after having watched and enjoyed the 1951 film adaptation No Highway In the Sky. It's a case, I think, where book and film are both very good on their own and complement each other well even though they differ in some particulars. In the book we get much deeper into the hearts and minds of the characters, and many are much better developed than the constraints of a film allowed. I found it curious how the film's casting, in a physical sense, was totally wrong, and yet still managed to pull off the portrayal of the characters so I felt I recognized them when I read the novel. The one I appreciated much more in the book was Monica Teasdale—her reflections on her simple American roots and what direction her life might have taken had she not become a famous actress are very moving, and naturally not something translated to film with the foreign glamor of Marlene Dietrich in the role. Jimmy Stewart's Theodore Honey was also played a little more broadly comical, whereas in the book Honey is rather more pathetic and troubled. In the film the doubts of Honey's sanity seem to be based more off his absent-minded personality, where the book gives him a background of more intricate issues such as his interest in spiritualism and apocryphal religious theories and prophecies. It seems more reasonable for people to doubt a man's sanity because he believes he can predict the end of the world from the angle of the Great Pyramid than because he tries to unlock the door of the wrong house.The first-person narration is unique: the narrator relates events he witnessed, but also the parts that took place in his absence, with so much detail that it's practically third-person. I've only encountered two authors that used this method, Shute and Max Brand. You don't want to let the amounts of technical language put you off; even if it's Greek to you, you can just go with the flow and gain a basic understanding from the context, for it is after all a vital part of the story. It's written in such a way that I found it fascinating, even though most of it was beyond me. The film's main weakness, a rather abrupt ending, is not present in the novel, which is much better rounded off and concluded (the part that Honey's spiritualist dabblings play in the resolution is certainly eyebrow-raising, but somewhat amusing). A good read.
What do You think about No Highway (2002)?
I'd forgotten how good this one was. My favorite scene was the meeting when all the proper British types let fly at one another over the matter of the possibility of fatigue fractures in the tailplane of the fictional Reindeer aircraft. It reminded me of many a contentious meeting I've seen while working to put new machinery into commission in mills and plants around the world. I was very proud of our narrator for standing by his employee Mr. Honey even when he did something so crazy as lifting the undercarriage of a plane that the operators wouldn't ground that was unsafe. He pulled the switch to lift the undercarriage while the plane was sitting on the tarmac. Up went the wheels and down came the plane on its belly. He grounded it all right. =) I wish my bosses would stand behind their employees so steadfastly as that.The movie they made of this book features James Stewart as Mr. Honey, and he's perfect for the role. When something similar happened to real airplanes in Britain a decade after this book came out, people asked "Where is Mr. Honey?" Nevil Shute is so funny and great. His books are totally true to life. He's got the greatest understated sense of humor. Mr. Honey is one of my favorite of his characters. Please read this one. It's a sheer delight.
—Tatiana
Dennis Scott is manager of an office of engineers working on various aeronautical concerns. One of these men, Theodore Honey, is investigating fatigue failure in the tail portion of the Reindeer - a fleet of British Trans-Atlantic planes. It is his belief that the tail will show evidence of fatigue failure at 1440 hours of service. Getting others to believe him is difficult. If only they had concrete evidence. Then they receive word of a crash in Canada attributed to pilot error but the plane had an appropriate number of service hours and a senior level pilot. Is this the break they needed? I enjoyed this, although it got a bit technical at the beginning with the engineering explanation of the type of failure. Perhaps my working for a company involved with supplying components to the airlines (commercial and military) contributed to my enjoyment. I understand about the need for engineering evaluations that are done to qualify a system or analyze a failure. It is interesting to think about this as a precursor for what might be standard knowledge today. apart from that, it is an interesting cast of characters to get to know and follow. Essentially it is two families and the impact that the investigation has on them. The appropriate government officials are brought in as necessary.
—Sue
I wasn't sure how to rate this. It's a curious mixture of the gripping and the absolutely mundane. The gripping part involves a search by a bunch of engineers to prove that the tail wing of a new passenger plane contains a latent design flaw (which admittedly doesn't sound that gripping, but in Nevil Shute's hands becomes so) while the mundane part concerns pretty much everything else, specifically a horrendous domestic drama involving a cast of insipid female characters straight out of a Cholmondley Warner sketch. Honestly, I'm not sure why Shute thought this constituted the "bits that make it fun" as he more or less makes one of his characters say on the final page. I'm not even sure if it would've been particularly fun for his readers at the time. With the exception of the narrator's wife, it would be hard to call these characters anything other than vapidly drawn caricatures, a sort of wish fulfilment wife fancy for men of the 1940s, I suppose, loyal, sweet tempered, a bit dim but keen to learn all the domestic duties required of them. And ever so pretty. Etc.Another thing which bothered me was that Shute frequently violated one of the principal rules of POV by narrating several chapters outside of the experience of the main character (the book is written in the first person). I'm not usually a massive stickler for things like that, but the fact that pretty much all these chapters involved the nonsense above made them seem especially pointless. Luckily the main story is a belter, and Shute has an excellent way of conveying pretty technical engineering terms to the layman in a clear and concise manner. Had the book focussed purely on this aspect of the story and cut out all the fluff I'd probably be rating it a four.
—Nomadman
