Trustee From The Toolroom (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
Keith Stewart is a middle-aged mechanic who has given up the daily grind of a job to make mechanical models—for the joy he derives from them, and for the meagre income they bring him from the magazine Miniature Mechanics, for which he writes articles. He and his wife Katie (a store employee) lead a quiet, uneventful life. Very unlike Keith's sister Jo, married to an ex-naval officer, John Dermott. Jo and John lead far more flamboyant, exciting lives, and having decided one day to migrate to Canada, ask Keith and Katie to look after their 10-year old daughter Janice for the few months she will be in Britain while her parents sail in their little yacht all the way to Vancouver. Before they embark on the voyage, however, John turns to Keith for help. Firstly, John and Jo want Keith to be the trustee for Janice should anything happen to her parents. Keith agrees. Secondly, they own a jewel box (filled, John explains, with Jo's jewels, which she is legally not allowed to take out of the country), and he wants Keith to help him fix the box—encased in concrete—to the boat's engine, so that they can smuggle it out without anybody being the wiser. Keith obliges...... And, a few weeks later, learns that Jo and John’s yacht has been wrecked. They were caught in a storm in the Pacific, and their bodies have been washed up, identified and buried. Their solicitor informs Keith, and informs him too that Janice's inheritance is pitifully small—her parents' bank accounts hold less than £100 between them. Some digging into documents reveals that the Dermotts had converted the bulk of their fortune into diamonds; Keith concludes that these were in the box he helped hide, and which should still be there in the wreck. So, aware that he owes it to Janice to retrieve those diamonds, Keith sets out. A man who’s never been outside England, a man with just about £100 to his (and Katie’s) name. A man who’s lived a very secluded, quiet life. He goes off, to a remote island in the Pacific, in search of diamonds. Trustee From the Toolroom is an adventure story—but a heart-warming, never really high-adrenaline style of adventure. This is a story about human relationships, about how completely unconnected people can help each other out of simple humanity; how a good turn deserves another. It’s sweet (but never syrupy), touching, funny (especially the sections relating to the delightfully eccentric Jack Donnelly), absorbing book about a man’s solo quest which turns into a group effort. And it has one of the most likeable protagonists I’ve ever encountered: “… an honest little man of lower-middle-class suburban type, content to go along upon a miserable salary for the sake of doing the work he loved…”. Keith Stewart is not handsome, or witty or heroic in the usual sense of the word. But he’s a wonderfully likeable man, the sort of character who does that little bit to help restore your faith in mankind. This book is much like him: gentle, likeable, warm and friendly. Personally, I could have done with a little less detail on the technical front (I’m woefully bad at anything to do with physics or related disciplines, so much of this went completely over my head), but still. A good introduction, as far as I’m concerned, to the work of Nevil Shute.
I listen to audiobooks sometimes. This was one of those times. The "audible" book was read by Frank Muller and I thought it was done well, if a little dry. It is easy to listen to. The voices for different characters are also handled fine. This was Nevil Shute's final novel, finished before his death and left to his daughter to publish. Shute is one of my favorite authors. This one seems to be a favorite book among his readers, although I'd rate it as a lesser work. I have yet to read one I disliked. Shute wrote about twenty novels and I've only read about half of them, and most were long ago. I should have read this in the mid 80's after a trip to Tahiti had me temporarily seeking out novels set in the South Pacific. I don't know if I would have appreciated the book very much then, although I liked being familiar with the some of the names and locations of islands in the story.I guess I'd say it is just a nice book that shows the good in people, and how it might surprise you a little. The beginning is a little slow and plodding. It is all about establishing characters and the set-up for what is to come. I had my doubts about the start, but the book gets markedly better with chapter two and improves.Our titular character, Keith Stewart, the trustee from the toolroom, leaves his quiet life and goes on a very unexpected journey across the world. We meet some interesting characters and Keith meets friends he never knew he had and experiences the world. Bits of the story are, to me, a little tedious with an excess attention to detail (and this is in keeping with the detail oriented main character) but overall the story is a very good one as we follow Keith's journey from England to Polynesia to recover his niece's inheritance on a boat wreck crashed upon a remote reef. It seems odd to me to call something a kind novel, but that is the word that springs to my mind. There is something very warm and fuzzy nice about this book.As an aside, it is always a plus to me to learn a little history about something, and that happened here. I didn't know that England had such restrictive policies on converting pounds into dollars at the time this was written (1960 or so). That fact, that England didn't want capital leaving the country, is integral to what happens in this story.
What do You think about Trustee From The Toolroom (2002)?
Nevil Shute is my all time favorite author. His stories and characters are just wonderful. Very easy reading and you don't want the story to end. This one is about Keith Stewart who lives quietly in suburban London, working free-lance for a model mechanic magazine. His sister and brother-in-law have him hide a jewel box aboard their sailboat just before they emigrate to Vancouver. But when the ship goes down in the South Pacific with them aboard, Keith must not only raise their young daughter, but must seek to retrieve the jewel box from the wreck.He has never been outside of England before so faces many difficulties but people all along his path are quite willing to help him and he helps them also.
—Penny
This is my second favorite Nevil Shute story, after "A Town Like Alice."My Dad flew full-sized airplanes and sailplanes, and also model airplanes; especially small rubber-band powered "Peanut" scale airplanes. He was known among the world-wide model airplane community as the "Ol' Professor" for the informative quality he incorporated into his numerous scale model airplane designs and instructions.My Dad and Keith Stewart were so alike that many of his friends would point out the similarity between the two of them after they discovered this Nevil Shute tale of a supremely contented designer and model builder, who journeys from England to a deserted South Pacific atoll to keep faith with his dead sister and brother-in-law and return with his neice's inheritance from the wreckage of their sailboat.Like Keith Stewart, my Father was always "perfectly, supremely, happy" with the way his work and his hobbies meshed together.
—Curtiss
