What Makes This Book So Great Read online

  I think that original huge popularity was because there were a lot of intelligent middle-class people in Britain, the kind of people who bought books, who had seen a decline in their standard of living as a result of the new settlement. It was much fairer for everyone, but they had been better off before. Nevil Shute complains in Slide Rule (1954) that his mother couldn’t go to the South of France in the winters, even though it was good for her chest, and you’ve probably read things yourself where the characters are complaining they can’t get the servants anymore. Asimov had a lovely answer to that one: If we’d lived in the days when it was easy to get servants, we would have been the servants. Shute’s mother couldn’t afford France but she and the people who waited on her in shops all had access to free health care and good free education to university level and beyond, and enough to live on if they lost their jobs. The social contract had been rewritten, and the richer really did suffer a little. I want to say “poor dears,” but I really do feel for them. Britain used to be a country with sharp class differences—how you spoke and your parents’ jobs affected your healthcare, your education, your employment opportunities. It had an empire it exploited to support its own standard of living. The situation of the thirties was horribly unfair and couldn’t have been allowed to go on, and democracy defeated it, but it wasn’t the fault of individuals. Britain was becoming a fairer society, with equal opportunities for everyone, and some people did suffer for it. They couldn’t have their foreign holidays and servants and way of life, because their way of life exploited other people. They had never given the working classes the respect due to human beings, and now they had to, and it really was hard for them. You can’t really blame them for wishing all those inconvenient people would … all be swallowed up by a volcano, or stung to death by triffids.

  The people who went through this didn’t just write, and read, cosy catastrophes. There were a host of science-fictional reactions to this social upheaval, from people who had lived through the end of their world. I’m going to be looking at some more of them soon.

  OCTOBER 20, 2009

  70. Stalinism vs Champagne at the opera: Constantine Fitzgibbon’s When the Kissing Had to Stop

  When the Kissing Had to Stop was published in 1960, and republished in 1980, which is when I first read it. It’s a book set in the near future of 1960, clearly intended as a warning “if this goes on” type of story, about a Britain taken over by a Soviet plot aided by a few troops and some gullible British people, much as Norway was taken over by Hitler in 1941 and Tibet by China in 1959. (Russia never in fact used that kind of tactics.) It’s written in a particularly omniscient form of bestseller omni, it has a large but consistent cast of characters, and many of the chapters consist of such things as saying what they were all doing on Christmas Eve. The characters are very well done, there are Aldermaston marches (cynically funded by Russia for their own ends), there’s a coup, and by the end all the characters except one are dead or in gulags. I think I’ve always read it through in one sitting, sometimes until very late at night, it’s not a book where it’s possible for me to sleep in the middle.

  Re-reading this now, I’ve just realised that this was a very influential book. I’m not sure if it was influential on anyone else, indeed, though my copy quotes glowing reviews from the British mainstream press, I’m not sure if anyone else ever read it at all. But it was very influential on me, and particularly in the way I wrote about people going on with their ordinary lives while awful things happen in the Small Change books. Fitzgibbon does that brilliantly here, they’re worrying about who loves who and whether to get a divorce and all the time the Russians are coming. He also keeps doing the contrasts between upper-class luxury and horror—from carol singing in a country house to carol singing in the gulag, from the Kremlin plotting to champagne at the opera.

  This isn’t a subtle book, and it isn’t really science fiction—it was clearly published as a mainstream book. Fitzgibbon tries harder than most mainstream writers of Awful Warnings to do extrapolation. The Irish lord who works in an advertising agency and who is one of the more significant characters is working on a campaign for “fuelless” atomic cars. Otherwise, he has extended the trends of the late fifties forwards without actually coming up with any of the actual developments of the sixties. They’re getting a Russian invasion and atomic cars, but they are listening to big band dance music and they have teddy boys. This isn’t a problem. He tried, and it feels like a reasonable 1960 anyway.

  It isn’t a cosy catastrophe, but it does have some things in common with one. First, there’s a catastrophe, though all the book leads up to it. Second, all but two of the characters are middle or upper class—and those two are very minor, a black American soldier and his Cockney girlfriend. All the others, including the defector who returns briefly from a gulag, are very definitely of the ruling classes. The omniscient narrator says that the working classes have been made just as comfortable and have a high standard of living—but we see lots of servants, and lots of riots and discontent. The main difference is that nobody survives—but a lot of the characters are quite unpleasant, in quite believable ways. The positive characters tend to die heroically, and as for the others, I’m delighted to see some of them get to the gulag. There’s a strong flavour of “they got what they deserve” about this book, even more than “it could happen here.” And there’s a huge stress on the cosiness of luxury and alcohol and country houses and church on Sunday.

  We spend most time with Patrick, Lord Clonard, who works in advertising, helps the CIA, and worries about his love for the actress Nora May. Nora isn’t really a character, we see very little of her point of view. She’s married with a son, but having an affair with Patrick. Her sister, the novelist Antonia May, drags Nora into the anti-Nuclear movement. Antonia is really obnoxious. She has a lovely body but an ugly face, she doesn’t like real sex and she’s pitifully in love with the politician Rupert Page-Gorman—my goodness, his name is enough. Page-Gorman is shown as cynically manipulating the people. He started as a Conservative MP and crossed the floor to Labour when he saw he could do better there. (Did you know Churchill started off as a Tory, crossed to Liberal, became an independent and then ended up back with the Tories?) The Russians, whose inner councils we see, are shown as just as cynical, barely paying lip service to their supposed ideals. The other politicians on both sides are shown as indecisive and narrow of vision—except for Braithwaite, who is genuine and stupid and totally conned by the Russians.

  There’s one very odd and interesting character, Felix Seligman. He’s a financier. (Stop cringing.) Felix is an English Catholic of Jewish ancestry. He’s portrayed as genuinely generous, hospitable, loyal, brave and patriotic. He’s also the only character to survive out of the camps—he ends up as a notorious guerrilla leader in Wales. (He spent WWII in the Guards.) He’s also surprisingly civilized to Nora, even though she doesn’t love him and is having an affair with Patrick. He loves their son, and traditions, and he’s the only person in the whole book who is entirely uncompromised. Yet though Fitzgibbon is bending over backwards to avoid anti-Semitism, he does give Felix an instinct (which he doesn’t obey) that he inherited from his ancestors who used it to get out of Russia and then Germany in time. And he is a financier and he does get a large part of his money out of the country through loopholes—not that it does him or his son any good as things turn out.

  Fitzgibbon himself had an interesting background. His father was of the impoverished Irish aristocracy, and his mother was an American heiress. He went to Exeter College Oxford in 1938, and joined the Irish Guards when WWII began in September 1939. When the US came into the war in December 1941 he transferred to the U.S. Army. After the war Fitzgibbon divided his time between London and his Irish property, making a living with writing and journalism. I’ve read some of his history and biography, it’s lively and makes no attempt at impartiality. I think his status as an Irishman in England gave him a particular angle in writing this book, a deep know
ledge but a useful slight detachment. I think his class background and experience with living through the British resettlement of the forties led to this particular story, though I suspect the immediate impetus for it was the 1956 events of Suez, proving Britain’s political impotence in the wider world, and Hungary, demonstrating Soviet ruthlessness.

  I think this book is meant not just as a warning but as a reminder as well. The text states outright that Britain isn’t Latvia or Tibet—he means his readers of the Cold War to consider what has happened to Latvia and Tibet, and as the Americans in the story abandon Britain to the USSR, he means the readers to consider that they have abandoned Eastern Europe to it. If you read Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, which I very much recommend, you can see Orwell in 1937 suggesting that people buy printing presses, because the day was coming when you wouldn’t be able to, and it would be useful to have one for producing samizdat. (He doesn’t call it that.) That day didn’t come, in Britain, but it did in Eastern Europe, for the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Poles. When the Kissing Had to Stop is drawing a real parallel there, saying that Britain shouldn’t be comfortable and complacent when the gulags were real and Communism was dominating half the world. The real Russians weren’t much like Fitzgibbon’s Russians, the real world didn’t go his way, but the resolution in the UN in the book to protect the British way of life is modeled on the one brought before the UN in 1959 with reference to Tibet.

  OCTOBER 22, 2009

  71. The future of the Commonwealth: Nevil Shute’s In the Wet

  I first read In the Wet (1953), along with most of Shute, in the seventies when I was a kid. Nevil Shute was, according to his fascinating autobiography Slide Rule, an oddly technically and scientifically minded man for a member of the British upper-middle classes in the twenties and thirties. He spent much of his life around flying machines (airships as well as planes) and when he came to write popular fiction, flying machines featured heavily in it. Some of his work is clearly science fiction, On the Beach (1957) is probably the best known, and the rest of it tends to be interested in science and engineering in just exactly the way in which SF is and mainstream fiction isn’t. Shute flourished from the thirties to the seventies, he was a bestseller. He’s always a comfort read for me, and I am especially fond of the work he produced at night during WWII, when he had no idea who was going to win, while working designing planes all day. His best work I think is Requiem for a Wren (1955) (aka The Breaking Wave in the US, in a particularly stupid example of “what were they thinking” retitling), a novel about getting over WWII, and A Town Like Alice (1950) (aka Legacy in the US, because how stupid can you get to replace a terrific title with a bland one), a novel about how civilization works. I’m delighted to see that all these books are in print from Random House UK—though they’re also the kind of thing your library may well have, and that you can pick up secondhand easily because they were printed in vast quantities.

  Shute has huge quantities of the elusive “IWantToReadItosity” that I talked about with reference to Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve read his books, once I pick one up and read a paragraph I always want to read the whole thing again. Having said all this, it’s only fair to say that viewed objectively, In the Wet is a very odd book, and clearly influenced by the British upheavals I talked about in the cosy catastrophe post.

  This is not the kind of book where spoilers matter.

  In the Wet begins with 80 pages (in the Canadian hardcover) of setup. A British Church of England parson explains, in first person, that he’s spent much of his life in Australia, that he has malaria, and the circumstances in which he meets a drunken old man called Stevie, and then comes to be at Stevie’s bedside during the wet season, as Stevie is dying. Stevie relates his life story—only he doesn’t, the priest has malaria and is delirious, a nurse who was also present the whole time heard nothing. Also, the life Stevie tells is a life that takes place in the future—the book was published and this frame is set in 1953, the main part of the story takes place in 1983. It’s Stevie’s next life as David Anderson that we hear about.

  This isn’t a frame a science fiction writer would have found necessary or desirable, and it opens up questions about reincarnation that somewhat get in the way of the actual story. Having said that, H. Beam Piper wrote about reincarnation in an entirely SFnal (as opposed to fantastic) way, so it isn’t inherently an illegitimate subject. Shute returns to the frame briefly in the middle, as David Anderson’s nightmare, and at the end, where the priest christens David as a baby and gets enough evidence from external sources to convince himself that what he has heard is true. It works surprisingly well, though it puts the happy ending in an odd place.

  So, we have a story set in 1983. In the afterword to this Canadian edition (which I’m sure wasn’t in my old British paperback) Shute says he intends this as speculation about the future of the British Commonwealth. That strikes me as an odd thing to want to do. The US is mentioned twice in the book, once geographically (they’re flying over part of it) and once politically—an Australian is asked if he’d want Australia to leave the Commonwealth and join with the States, and reacts with horror. While Canada and other Commonwealth countries get more prominence, this is really a speculation about the future of the two countries Shute knew well—Britain and Australia. Now, the Commonwealth does still exist, and it is of course utterly different from the way Shute imagined it. The Royal Family still exists, as well, but is probably if anything even further from what Shute imagined.

  The story of In the Wet concerns David Anderson, an Australian pilot who gets a job with the Queen’s Flight at a time when Canada and Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth love the Queen and Britain doesn’t. There’s a constitutional crisis, Britain gets a Governer General, Australia gets the Queen, David Anderson falls in love and becomes engaged to a British girl. It’s essentially a sweet love story against a science-fictional background, though there don’t seem to have been many technological or social changes since the fifties—people still change for dinner, for instance.

  Shute’s future Britain is one in which housing prices have collapsed to nothing because of massive emigration, Britain has a shrinking population due to massive emigration, and the country has been socialist for thirty years. It has however remained a world leader in technological advances, despite everyone being pale and pasty and still living on badly managed rations. (He was so wrong about rations. WWII rationing produced the healthiest generation ever.) He simultaneously says that the working classes have had their standard of living raised so it’s very high, and talks about how underfed and poor everyone is compared to Australia. This 1983 is an “if this went on” of the post-war settlement taken to great extremes—and also one in which Britain remained economically part of the Commonwealth and not part of Europe, despite geography, while having no immigration at all. Rosemary, the British heroine, has never seen a new house. Shute seems to think it’s very important that the British population shrink until the island can feed itself. I don’t know why importing food isn’t the trivial matter it is in reality. And while I have myself emigrated, Britain has generally been a magnet for immigration.

  There’s an interesting point here that again demands comparison with Piper. (I wonder if Piper read Shute? Or Shute read Piper either?) Gumption is not in fact genetic. If all your people with gumption emigrate, you’ll have just as many people with gumption in the next generation. The same goes with engineering skills. As long as you still have your school system working, it doesn’t matter in the long term if you lose technically trained people. Shute’s Britain, unlike Piper’s Sword Worlds, manages to retain technology, indeed their ability to technologically innovate goes far beyond the real 1983. Japan doesn’t seem to be significant in this world. We don’t actually see any technology, except for the planes, but there are constant mentions in the abstract of British innovation and engineering. What we don’t have, oddly, considering, is a
ny aerospace—this is a 1983 where there hasn’t been a moon landing and there are no rockets.

  Australia, where Shute emigrated at about the time he was writing this book, is thriving. The reason it’s thriving is because it’s had a lot of immigration from Britain (but not from elsewhere in Europe or Asia, unlike in reality) and also because it has thrown out the system of “one man, one vote” and replaced it with a system in which everyone has one vote, and then people get extras for being nifty. It’s stated outright that this has produced a better kind of politician, handwave handwave, and this is why Australia has more food, a better climate and new housing developments. The votes are quite explicitly social engineering. Everyone gets one vote. Then you get another for higher education. (David, who has none, got that for becoming a flying officer, which is considered equivalent, and probably is.) There’s one for working outside the country for two years—David got that in the war. (Oh yes, BTW, WWIII has happened, we don’t know who participated but it wasn’t nuclear and seems a lot like WWII in terms of theatres and scale.) Then there’s a vote for raising two children to the age of fourteen without getting divorced—husband and wife both get it. There’s one for being rich—if your personal income is above a certain high figure. There’s one for church officials—any Christian churches. And the Seventh Vote is a special honour, like a knighthood, awarded in special cases to recognise excellence.

  David would have three votes in this system, and so would I—do take a moment to calculate how many you’d have, and whether you think the world would be better if you had that much more input. (I think it’s reasonable to consider the “wealth” vote at $60,000.) This is a direct response to the “Oh no, the working classes are people!” effect. A typical working-class person isn’t going to get more than a maximum of two votes. It’s also not as totally bizarre as it looks today—I mean it is, but it wasn’t in the context in which Shute was writing. Until 1950, there were additional MPs for university graduates and in Ireland even now, Trinity College Dublin has its own Seanad member. This does mean that qualified people had an extra vote, as Trinity graduates do today. (The present Trinity Seanad member, David Norris, is so cool that it’s hard to argue against.) So Shute’s idea was an extension of this, and not something completely out of the air. He says that women voting and the secret ballot were first introduced in Australia and then spread to Britain. Of course, while Australia does have compulsory voting, they just have one vote each like other democracies.