Requiem for a Wren

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I love Shute. Everything I have read of his has been better than the 5-stars I was allowed to give it. I had not intended to read this right now, having just read Pied Piper, but Bob convinced me it would be stupid to push this off so that I could read something I could not be assured would be as satisfying. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-02-01 18:13:36 Boxid IA40009921 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier It's still great. I'd forgotten about the Irish Terrier, Dev. I used to have Irish Terriers and I loved both dearly, Bridget, then Colleen. Naturally, it made the story all the better. While I accept that guilt is often experienced, I think it is drawn too far in the case of two central characters, both Janet Prentice and Alan Duncan. That Janet takes upon herself the guilt for seven war deaths, feeling she must pay in kind by losing seven she loves dearly, and that Alan feels guilty for Janet’s suicide stretches the power of guilt too far. The ending is particularly tragic. By this time we have come to know and like many characters. Alan is one of these characters and it is through his searches for Janet (he does not yet know that she has committed suicide) that we get to know not only her but Alan and a friend of Janet's, Viola. Alan and Viola get to know each other over the course of a year. Their relationship breaks off because it is clear to Viola (who loves Alan) that he is in love with Janet. Alan's opinion of Viola is that she is not in the same league as Janet. But the book ends with his leaving Australia to propose to Viola and bring her home as his wife. He, like Janet, ran out of options.

Janet was haunted by a decision she made in the course of her war duties. After that one mistake, she loses all her cherished people, one by one, as the war takes them, which she comes to feel is justice for her unforgivable act. As a character she is heartbreaking; as a symbol she embodies the impossible burdens of war. Meanwhile, Alan, who needs his own healing, has become obsessed with his quest to find her. The cruellest accident of all is Alan's arrival at the house in Australia, too late to meet her in person. As we read, the pressure of this timing grows to tragic proportions; if he had come home just a few months earlier, would that have saved Janet in some way? Could she have forgiven herself? Would it have saved him? My spouse and I have been watching a program called Foyle's War. It's essentially a British cop show, but set in WWII. It's a wonderful show, but it got me started thinking about WWII-era things, and I decided to dust off this gem from the past. Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL9722439M Openlibrary_edition As I said this was my second Nevil Shute book and what amazed me again is that in both the books, his women characters are super strong and totally amazing. You've got to read this book to know what she does in Army and how. Imagine a broad shouldered girl with a square face who claims she isn't much of a beauty but what she does with Guns is something everybody watches with their eyes popping out. One unfortunate mistake in the course of the war for which she is never blamed by anyone changes her life for good. Where that episode leads her and how it all ruins her life to no repair is the story is all about. Heart-breaking yet a emotional roller coaster ride of the three amazing characters and their friends and family is totally out of this world experience. Nevil Shute's stories are totally smooth and his narrative is just so gripping yet simple that I found the book to be totally unputdownable as my heart kept asking me to go forward and solve the riddle. Plus I wanted to race to the end to know how it all ends. As I said it was one of the most emotional stories that I ever read, it is very tough to point out the moments it made me super emotional. The entire journey of one brother to find his dead brother's lover touched me deep inside, every-time his search fails, my heart cried out. Also the girls struggle after her loss and after so many deaths, the point where she finally loses something which makes her cry for the first time was the moment my tears just rolled out, unable to control the barrage. Wow, that was just wow moment and I feel totally out of words to explain why and what I felt at that moment. If you read the book, you will certainly know and agree with me on that.Shute's talent for description allowed me to feel like I was right there in the Australian family home/estate/sheep farm looking out at the gorgeous rural landscapes. Equally effective were the descriptions of the other settings in France, England, and America. Nevil Shute Norway was born on 17 January 1899 in Ealing, London. After attending the Dragon School and Shrewsbury School, he studied Engineering Science at Balliol College, Oxford. He worked as an aeronautical engineer and published his first novel, Marazan, in 1926. In 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton and they went on to have two daughters. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons. After the war he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death on 12 January 1960. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), No Highway (1948), A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957). Reading through Janet's diaries, Alan learns that she came to Australia to find Bill's family, and that she still feels she must atone for the deaths of the seven men. He realizes that, after Bill's death, he and Janet, though never meeting, came to love each other, and ought to be the master and mistress of the family property; but now, the ghosts of Bill and Janet make it impossible for him to stay. But then he learns, as if from the ghosts, that he should "do the job for them"; and there is a woman in England, Viola, the other former Wren, who he should marry. Yes. I like Nevil Shute's writing. I think A Town Like Alice is his best work so I would always recommend that title first. I do think he is very good at describing life in the British Armed Services during WWII. Those that enjoy military history and writing will like his books, but even I enjoyed them (and I have little knowledge of planes and guns).

Nevil Shute was extremely popular in the 1940s and 50s. He wrote in a straightforward, highly readable style on subjects that he knew about. Thus it is not surprising that there are quite a few technical references in this book, especially to equipment used in the Normandy landings of 1944 (Shute, an officer in the RNVR, was actually present at D-Day) but these are easily comprehensible to the ordinary listener. The atmosphere and tension of those weeks before the invasion is very well caught. Nevil Shute is a rare breed of writer. His books are full of danger, romance and other dynamics. But the principal theme in all his work is dignity amid and often accompanied by death. In On the Beach Shute depicted a group of Australians awaiting radiation fall out and subsequent death with strength and forbearance. A Town Called Alice showed a group of Australians living and dying amid the Pacific theater of WWII. The Breaking Waves mines familiar terrain. It follows a group of people through WWII and the subsequent decade or so afterward. Shute’s thesis in this book is that war can go on killing and affecting people long after the final battle. Also, Shute argues that peace is often impossible because people who fight wars in their youth become nostalgic for the war, without realizing it’s their youth they actually miss, and thus will support future wars rather than peace for a chance to return to that excitement. Nothing they realize will ever touch them the way the war did, and they long to return to that feeling all their days. If this sounds heavy for a novel, rest assured Shute is a master at plotting and keeps events moving. Requiem for a Wren is a departure for Shute from his usual "formula." It is a heart breaker. Close to the beginning of Requiem for a Wren the hero of the story commits suicide. Once she is found dead it is discovered that she had been living under an alias and there are no papers with which to identity her. The purpose of the rest of the book is to discover the identity of this woman and to allow the reader to get to know her and her motivations for killing herself. The more I read the more I liked this woman (Janet) and the sadder became her story. Setting aside my few complaints, I enjoyed the story immensely. The characters were so well drawn I felt like I knew each one of them. As I got to know Janet I kept hoping that she, who committed suicide at the beginning, would somehow be found alive.... perhaps the dead body was mis-identified ....and the ending would be a happy one, as I've come to expect from Shute. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2014-08-07 16:32:57.577853 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA1146308 City Leicester DonorShute reveals the end at the beginning, but only part of it, the devastating part. A young woman's suicide that seemingly has no rhyme or reason starts the returning home Aussie pilot on a journey through his past. The attention to detail is fantastic and the reader learns much about the nitty gritty of maintaining the gunnery parts of British WWII ships. I had no idea that there was such a thing as Ordinance Wrens in the War. They were an integral part of the War Effort and they suffered as much of what we know now as PTSD as any of the soldiers that saw action. While the story is more or less revolved around the narrator/protagonist, a good part of it is spent on the story of the wren officer, Janet Prentice. With slow accuracy, Alan brings to life Janet, and her story wins the reader's sympathy. Her life is weighed by grief and guilt, and the resulting PTSD completely unmans her. Life afterward is nothing but just a struggle for survival, which battle she loses at the end. Have you listened to any of Damien Warren-Smith’s other performances before? How does this one compare? Albeit sad, I can accept Janet’s inability to love and marry anyone other than Bill Duncan, Alan’s brother. With Alan’s return home, that she chooses suicide makes sense to me too. Alan’s love for Janet never felt genuine to me, and his decision to marry Viola Dawson isn’t drawn convincingly either.

The Breaking Wave is one of Nevil Shute's most poignant and psychologically suspenseful novels, set in the years just after World War II.Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it’s all over. Glorious read and the first "war book" that spoke of the postwar stresses... not PTSD but "war is over! what shall I do now" stress. I've heard a second hand tale from one children of a war veteran (RAF Group Captain) who said "the war years were the best years of my life" and then he added "never tell that to your mother". To be honest, I'm not sure your original assessment is wrong. There is all that, and it's more evident in some novels than others. When I think about it, it could be that Shute's novels are soap operas for an industrial society, rather than a financial one, which automatically gives them the appearance of rather more substance. An Old Captivity is definitely interesting; it contains the usual simplistic relationship stuff, but large parts of it consist of practical arrangements for a trip to a sub-arctic island, the detail of which is almost anti-fiction. Then you have a book like Ruined City which is a sort of capitalist fairytale and which reflects his extreme right-wing views. At some point I decided that with Shute it was best to take him book by book, if I was at all inclined to do so, and I'm not really - I've been through about half his output and the remainder are marked to read, at some point, someday.