PASTORAL

Nevil Shute has a gift for humanizing even the grimness of war, for sentiment which does not drip, for spinning a good yarn — and this is a salutary influence in these days of tortured realities. His new novel is well named, for he has actually written a pastoral idyll of a bomber base! He makes his characters live:- the bomber crew who are his central characters are ardent, though rather amateurish, fishermen, from the pilot captain down. Their enthusism, has been one factor welding them into a team that has accomplished some fifty odd operations, virtually unscathed. Into this Eden, with leisure time escape into the woods, comes Eve in the form of Gervase, homesick WAAF officer, who puts her job first, and finding herself won from that concentration by the pilot's ingenuous admiration, gives him 'the gate' — at cost to them both. The result is less of morale — fishing and gunning for pigeons and night walks in search of wild creatures can no longer supply the needed antidote to the strain of bombing missions, and R for Robert comes a-cropper. Then the post commandant goes to work (and Shute gives the story in very human terms) — and Gervabe salvages crew morals by getting them trout fishing rights, and helps plane and pilot and wounded gunner to make the home field by radio signal, when need demands. A charmingly told tale of young love in the midst of war. Surely popular.