One of the things about working in a library is that a tremendous number of books come through my hands. Since there are a tremendous number of books that I am vaguely interested in reading, when there is overlap between those large groups, I find myself actually reading one of those books that I was really only vaguely interested in. This is a Good Thing, in that it leads me to read books that I would never actually have picked up despite wanting to read them. It is a Bad Thing, however, in that there is limited time in the world, even in my world, for reading random stuff. On the whole, the good outweighs the bad.
One book that came into my hands a few weeks ago was Neville Shute’s memoir Slide Rule. This is not a memoir of his writing life, except for a handful of mentions here and there. It’s a memoir of his life in aerodynamic engineering.
Anyone interested in dirigibles, airships or zeppelins of any kind would benefit from reading this book, just because it contains massive amounts of well-told anecdotes about building the R100 and R101. Just as a taste—on the occasion of the first flight of the R100, they get it out of the hangar and up into the air and then go to the galley and have scrambled eggs for breakfast. In the experimental airship. If I read that in some Kenneth Oppel book, I would laugh at the ridiculousness of it. But it happened.
Seriously, Mr. Shute (or Mr. Norway, to give him his proper name) is a magnificent raconteur. Wonderful. This is a wonderful book of wonderful anecdotes. As he says at the beginning, he’s lucky that there were just a few years where the aeronautics industry was the sort of place where a company could make a change in an airplane and then take it up and see how it flies. Those years coincided with the prime of his working life. That made his life very interesting, and makes his book very interesting, too.
On the other hand, Mr. Norway is a reactionary old Tory of the most profoundly opposite views to my own. His instinct is that a hereditary aristocrat is likely to be a good and patriotic man, and a civil servant is likely to be an arrogant fool, and his experience confirms him in those opinions. It would be surprising if it didn’t; our experience often confirms us in our prejudices. For somebody like me, reading Slide Rule is a mixture of chuckles of pleasure at the writing and grunts of annoyance at the politics. But it’s worth it.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.