1938 fiction. Henry Warren, a successful banker, works all his waking
hours, travelling across Europe to sort out financial deals,
particularly share issues. His digestion is bad, and his wife's having
an affair with a foreigner. When all the stress catches up with him,
he winds up in the hospital of a northern town, one that's been
without significant employment since the shipyard closed, and decides
to do something about it. (US vt Kindling.)
But, as he says, there's no way it can be done honestly. So
Warren, until now a model of probity, goes after a thoroughly dodgy
contract with an unstable Balkan nation, since they're the only people
desperate enough for foreign finance that they can be persuaded to
order ships from a yard that's been shut down and needs to be
restarted. Once that initial order's gone through, and people are back
at work, the yard should be able to stand on its own feet; but it has
to be got going.
Shute had experience of corporate finance, having worked as Calculator
on the R100 project, and more significantly having been a director of
Airspeed Ltd from its founding in 1931 (and having engaged in a bit of
very carefully-shaded prospectus-writing himself); one suspects that
he was writing from the life, or at least from the life he'd have
liked to arrange.
The utter corruption of the Balkan nation is perhaps heavy-handed, and
the description of Warren's wife's lover would be thoroughly offensive
if written today. And there's rather too much coincidence (a
disgruntled secretary just happens to find an incriminating letter,
and to meet someone to whom she can give it to do damage). But this is
a fairy story at heart, about the knight in well-tailored armour who
rides in and saves the town, and coincidences are the sort of thing
that happens in fairy stories.
There's a romance, but as often in Shute it's low-key: it's
principally a very deep friendship growing between two compatible
people, with marriage as a way in which they can eventually express
it.
As a final note of irony, this book was published shortly before
British shipbuilding entered terminal decline as welding took over
from riveting.
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