Round the Bend - Nevil Shute

Tom Cutter wants to fly. As a young boy in Southampton, he leaves his job in a garage to hang around a flying circus. From this first job, picking up paper & cleaning the planes, he eventually becomes part of one of the clown acts & meets Constantine Shaklin, a boy of his own age of Russian-Chinese parentage. Connie is an unusual boy with his mixed parentage & experience of living all over the world. His religious curiosity also makes him different. He goes to church, synagogue & mosque, as if he's searching for something or just exploring any idea that comes his way. Tom is intrigued but accepting of his friend's eccentricities. Eventually the circus moves on & Tom moves on with it, working on the planes in the winter, learning all he can. After a few years, the circus is wound up & Tom finds a job with an aircraft company while he waits to be old enough to train as a ground engineer. Connie goes out to live with his mother in the United States & the boys lose touch.

During the War, Tom stays with Airspace as an engineer but also takes advantage of cheap flying lessons for employees & qualifies as a test pilot. He spends part of the war in Egypt, repairing crashed aircraft. At the end of the war, Tom returns to Southampton to consider his future. A brief wartime marriage had ended in tragedy &, although he's offered an excellent job, he realises he can't face staying in Southampton with the sad memories of his wife, Beryl. With his experiences in the Middle East, he decides to start a charter freight business for companies operating in Bahrain.

From humble beginnings with just one old plane, Tom builds the business up through sheer hard work & rigid economy. He has no racial prejudices & employs local Arab & Asian pilots & engineers, giving them responsibility & trust. He also knows that local staff are cheaper to employ than Europeans. The change in Tom's fortunes & his life comes when he meets Connie Shaklin again. Connie is an engineer who had spent the war in Canada servicing aircraft. As a British citizen he joins up but insists that he won't fight as his beliefs do not permit him to kill. His other skills are utilised instead & after the war he went out to Bangkok & worked for Siamese Airways. Connie agrees to work for Tom & takes over the engineering side of the business.

From the beginning, Connie exercises a remarkable influence over the other men. He begins an evening prayer session at which all religious groups are welcome. Connie's own beliefs are never spelled out but he begins to be seen as a prophet, even a messiah by the locals. Tom is bemused but happy to let Connie continue as his workshop has never been better run & it's obvious that his influence is good. The business grows as Tom buys more aircraft, negotiates better deals & expands operations into South East Asia. Connie's religious mission also seems to be growing in popularity until there are hundreds of people gathering at the airfield each evening for prayers. This causes some friction with the local British authorities, already a little suspicious of Tom's willingness to work with the locals & stay outside the establishment. eventually, tom is told that Connie must leave.

On a trip to Burma, Tom meets an Englishman, Colonel Maurice Spencer, who has become a Buddhist monk who has heard of Connie & is keen to learn more. He speaks of Connie & his mission in a very mystical way,

We must look for the new Teacher. One day the Power that rules the Universe will send us a new Teacher, who will lead us back to Truth and help us to regain the Way. There have been four Buddhas in the history of this world, of whom Guatama was the last. One day a fifth will come to aid us, if we will attend to Him. Here in Burma we earnestly await His coming, for He is the Hope of the World.

Connie's religious mission continues alongside Tom's more prosaic story of his business. Connie's sister, Nadezna, comes out to Bahrain to work as Tom's secretary; the business continues to expand & it becomes obvious that Connie's mission is drawing to a climax.

Round the Bend is an unusual novel with a mixture of the practical & the mystical. The story of Tom's business is remarkably detailed; Nevil Shute's books all have this quality of building up the layers of detail, very practical & methodical, detailing all his decisions & contrivances. I found all this fascinating & Shute's own background in engineering is obvious. On the other hand, there's the ephemeral nature of Connie & his mission. Connie himself is modest, self-effacing but remote, rejecting all human relationships apart from his love for his sister & friendship with Tom. He seems to do very little but his influence on those around him is profound. The Christian overtones are sometimes a little too obvious, as when Tom denies that he thinks Connie has any divine qualities three times, but generally, Connie's influence is seen as a general force for good without beating a drum for any one kind of religious experience.

I found that the two aspects of the story worked well together. The Middle Eastern & Asian setting helped with this, I think, as Westerners still see the East as mysterious & this plays in to our perceptions as readers, as we identify with Tom. Round the Bend is a compelling book & I found it very hard to put down. Shute's style is so matter of fact, almost prosaic, that the religious elements seem quite ordinary within the charmed circle of Tom & his company. Tom himself just accepts Connie for who he is, without prejudice, as if he has been just as affected by Connie's magnetism as the workmen who believe that he is a prophet. The reactions of others, usually Europeans, just point the difference between two vastly different ways of looking at the world. I have several other Nevil Shutes on the tbr shelves & I'm looking forward to the next one very much.

Lost Horizon - James Hilton

Shangri-La has come to represent a forgotten world of youth & beauty. We've all heard of it even if we've never read the book, Lost Horizon, or seen the famous Frank Capra movie. James Hilton seems to have had a knack of writing stories that have been made into successful movies. His other books include Random Harvest (one of my favourite movies) & Goodbye, Mr Chips. Lost Horizon is an exciting adventure story with a core of melancholy & loss which I wasn't expecting to find.

The story is told in the form of a manuscript within the narrative. The narrator is having dinner with a group of people in an unnamed European capital. Berlin or Vienna, I think, as they dine at the Templehof. He's come across a couple of old school friends & they hear a curious story from another man about a plane hijacked in central Asia in the middle of a revolution. The plane disappeared, along with the four passengers. One of the passengers was Hugh Conway, a man they knew from school. After dinner, Rutherford takes our narrator aside & says he saw Conway long after he was assumed to be dead & heard the remarkable story of what happened to the hijacked plane. Rutherford is an author & he wrote down Conway's story & now gives it to the narrator to read.

Conway & his fellow passengers - Charles Mallinson, a young attache at the Embassy, Henry Barnard, an American businessman & Miss Roberta Brinklow, a missionary - had boarded the plan to escape from Baskul during a revolt. Instead of being taken to Peshawar, they soon realise that the pilot is headed in another direction entirely. The plane stops to refuel in a remote valley & armed men prevent them leaving the plane or asking any questions. Eventually, Conway realises that they are heading for Tibet by the mountainous terrain.

The pilot bungles the landing & dies before he can be questioned. While the passengers are debating their next move, a small party of men descend the mountain & take them by a tortuous route to a lamasery high in the mountains. Their guide, Chang, is Chinese but speaks good English & makes them comfortable. Conway asks many questions but Chang politely refuses to answer most of them. They are all surprised by the modern conveniences but anxious to leave & frustrated by Chang's inability to answer their questions. Conway soon relaxes into the curious atmosphere of the lamasery called Shangri-La as do Barnard, who turns out to be a fugitive from the law, & Miss Brinklow, who sees an opportunity to convert the inhabitants. Mallinson is desperate to leave & impatient with everyone & everything. He refuses to relax & is suspicious of the motives of Chang & the other inmates.

Conway is taken to see the High Lama & hears an amazing story of the founding of the lamasery by a European missionary called Perrault. The missionary brought Christianity to the inhabitants of the Tibetan mountains but the lamasery he founded has elements of all religions. The peculiar atmosphere of the mountains leads to Perrault & the other people there living long lives as long as they stay at Shangri-La. When Conway realises that the High Lama is Perrault, who came to Shangri-La in the 18th century, he is not as shocked as he should be as he has gradually come to realise that the lamasery is a magic place. Few outsiders ever discover the way in & the lamas are adept at enticing in the people they want as once you enter Shangri-La, you can only experience eternal youth if you never leave. The story takes place in the 1930s but there is a young Manchu girl there who arrived in the 1880s. There's also a man who learnt the piano from Chopin & can play unknown works by the composer. The inhabitants do grow old & die but so slowly that their lifespan is measured in decades rather than years.

The High Lama has chosen Conway to succeed him & when he dies soon after, Conway must decide his own fate & that of the others. Barnard & Miss Brinklow are quite prepared to stay but Mallinson rejects Conway's fantastic story. He is determined to leave, taking the Manchu girl, Lo-Tsen, with whom he has fallen in love, with him. He needs Conway's help to escape & Conway has to decide where his own future lies.

Lost Horizon is certainly an adventure story but it's not a swashbuckling adventure in the tradition of The Prisoner of Zenda. Conway is a man who has fought in WWI & been changed by the experience. His career in the diplomatic service has been mediocre but his experiences in the War have left him empty & directionless. The shadows of the next war are present & the idea of escaping from the world & the horrors to come are very attractive. However, I found the whole atmosphere of the book sadly melancholy & the idea of eternal youth quite depressing. Conway is tempted by the thought of seclusion & safety but he's a realist as well. We already know that he does leave Shangri-La but not how & what the consequences are for himself, Mallinson & Lo-Tsen.

Now that I've read the book, I'd like to see the movie with Ronald Colman. Looking at the cast list on imdb, I think a few changes have been made to the story. Jane Wyatt doesn't look like a female missionary to me & Conway appears to have acquired a younger brother! Still, I've requested the DVD from work so I'll be able to compare the two.