Ordeal
Nevil Shute
222 pages
published in 1939

Reading Ordeal was a bizarre experience. Bizarre, because what it looked like and what the package promised to be, was so very different from what it turned out to be. Sometimes having the wrong expectations of a book can ruin it for you, no matter how good the book is on its own merits. In this case however, it only added to the enjoyment, as I'll try to explain.

What had happened was this. Though this book was originally published in 1939, the edition I got was a Lancer paperback from 1965, which dit its utmost to hide the true age of this book. For a start, on the front cover it has a blurb which says: "Like his famous bestseller On the Beach, a prophetic spellbinding novel of man, war and destruction ...". This is not quite a lie, as this is a novel of man, war and destruction, is prophetic and spellbinding, but as a whole it raises entirely the wrong impression... This impression is not taken away by the back cover blurb" "Prophetic? Better read it while you can still be sure it's only fiction." Taken together and including the reference to On the Beach, I concluded this was a novel about World War III. I was nearly right...

In fact, this was a novel about World War II, written and published just before World War II went from prophecy to reality. I bet that never before or since has a future war novel become so quickly outdated. Future war stories and predictions between the wars were filled with the horrors of aerial bombardement as much as stories of World War III during the Cold War were filled with the horrors of nuclear warfare. In both cases these horrors were deemed unstoppable and so horrible that there was no defence against it. While (fortunately!) this hypothesis has not been tested with nuclear warfare, we do know now that mass bombing campaings of the kind seen in World War II and elsewhere are survivable, if still horrible. The idea that any nation would quickly surrender after been subjected to mass bombardment turned out to be untrue. Any story therefore dependent on this therefore seems quaint and vaguely naive, as if its author underestimated both the horrors to which humanity is capable as well as its capacity to withstand such horrors.

In Ordeal we follow Peter and Joan Corbett in their attempts to survive the nightly bombardments of England and find a safe place somewhere away from the bombings and the chaos they cause. At first, the bombings seem more of a nuisance than a menace, disrupting gas and water supplies, but impacting only lightly on Peter and Joan's home life. When the bombing continues however, with the bombers coming back night after night, life in the city becomes impossible. The Corbetts take to their boat, but life in the countryside is as much disrupted as it is in the cities. Finally they end up sailing to France, where Joan and the kids are put on a boat to Canada and Peter enlists in the navy.

Compared with the experiences in World War II, the bombings themselves seem far less destructive here, while the effects they have on everyday life are far greater. In the real World War II people more or less got used to it and the authorities quickly established ways to deal with the bombardments and their aftermath; here ordinary life collapses in the spate of a week or two as everybody flees the cities. As with most pre-war prophets of the destructive power of aerial bombardment Shute overestimated the effects it would have on civilians and also overestimated the ability of the bombers to break through competent air defences.

What is striking about the book apart from its prophetic qualities, is the underlaying decency of all the characters in the story. This seems to be a Shute trademark, as every book of his I've read is full of nice, comfortably middleclass English people quietly getting on with life. It is absolutely charming, if utterly unrealistic.