I just finished reading a Nevil Shute book, The Far Country, that showed up on Amazon for 99¢. Nevil Shute wrote novels in the evening. By day he was an excellent aerospace engineer. His career started in England but he moved to Australia after World War II. I have read Trustee from the Toolroom and A Town Like Alice, two of his best books. His most famous book, in some sense, is called On the Beach and is an apocalyptic vision that ends, so I hear — I haven’t read it, with humanity on the beach waiting to die. It was made into a movie which I also haven’t seen. I’ve read two or three others that I am aware of. At least one has some supernatural elements that I’m not fond of; the characters are still amazingly well-done. 

The title, The Far Country, comes from a poem by A. E. Housman, now in the public domain.

Into my heart an air that kills

from yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

I have two thoughts about the book. One interior and one exterior, so to speak.

(And there will be spoilers if you think you will end up wanting to read the book…)

The book is set around 1951 between England and Australia. 

Characters in the book include ~*~Jack, an Australian sheepherder and ~*~Jane, his English wife. She left England 30 years earlier to marry him and they were poor for about 25 of those years. Their youngest child, ~*~Angela, who loves the money her parents have made just recently, and thinks everything in England must be better than anything in Australia. The wife’s aunt Ethel. ~*~Ethel still lives in England and has a granddaughter named ~*~Jennifer who comes to visit Australia (Spoiler) after Ethel starves to death. 

There’s also a ~*~Czech character, named Carl, who was certified as a doctor in 1938, went through a lot of horror in the war, and made it to Australia as a Displaced Person. He can only be a lumberman in Australia, because the Australian authorities all say that his doctoring in the war is all very well but what does he know about sick children or things like that. (And some other bureaucratic reasons.) And there is a very elderly “barmaid.”

Many of these people have a chapter or two from their point of view. For example, Angela, the youngest character, longing to move to England, is getting ready to make a mistake and lose the “happy highways” where she was brought up. Jennifer, moving in the opposite direction, towards loving Australia more than England, nevertheless returns to England to do her duty to her father, when her mother dies. She has, let’s say, financial freedom to choose, not because she’s rich, but because Jack and Jane will help her travel between the two choices, when necessary. 

Carl, by contrast, has very limited freedom, remembers things in the past with great love, but is certain he cannot go back, and doesn’t want to even dwell on what is gone in his own life, though he pursues events from someone else’s past, that occurred near the lumber camp, in Australia. This pursuit adds an alternate layer of interest to the story. Not quite a mystery, but something to uncover. 

We see all these characters wrestling with their former lives, and wondering about what lies ahead, and it would be easy, though not quite correct, to think Shute was portraying England as the past and Australia as the future. The way this story is written, shifting from one view point to another, through many different characters, is compelling but strikes me as technically difficult.

In a certain sense, the poem suits the book, or adds depth to the presentation. At the same time, the best characters are walking away from the nostalgia represented in the poem and finding other reasons for their choices. So I found it a bit confusing.

That’s a bit of internal commentary. 

On an external level, the book makes very real how hungry people were in England in 1951, and how badly the government was doing, handling the situation. Ethel starves to death because the fund she paid into for her pension, goes bankrupt (and she’s too proud to voice her troubles). Rationing is now more stringent than during the war, and the meat ration keeps getting cut. 

D. E. Stevenson talks about this post war food problem in her book, Music in the Hills. The main character sends someone in London some eggs, because she’s heard that there aren’t enough. A government inspector comes and explains to her how AWFUL she is for keeping more than X number of chickens, and you can just see the bureaucracy strangling any chance of more food. It almost made me dislike the character because she was so accepting of the bureaucrat. Agatha Christie’s book, A Murder is Announced, also comments on country folk getting around food regulations at about the same time period.

Rabbit hole… I relate to this personally because when eggs were supposedly $12 a dozen in New York City, people all around me, in my semi-rural area, started keeping chickens. The price here stayed down.

Essentially, The Far Country was a story about people trying to understand some aspect of themselves, in order to take the next step in their lives, with more conscious choice. This is the story I want to write. Well, not this one, it’s already written, and not Australia or food scarcity, but you know? Ordinary people trying to figure things out.