Customer Reviews

Trustee from the Toolroom

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read this one when it was printed before ISBNs came into being. Before I left London & it has always been my favorite Nevil Shute story.

In this age of in-your-face language & novels saturated with every evil event a human's mind can plausibly conjure up, this master storyteller's quiet & lean prose about real, ordinary people & their choices, entices you into one man's little life of miniature models, hardworking wives & honoring one's vows.

From an unpeturbed basement workshop to the paradise of the broad Pacific ocean, a middle-aged man, more comfotable at his workbench than jetting across the world, takes on a mission to retrieve a treasure he himself hid in the ballast of his sister & brother-in-law's wrecked sail boat.

For the sake of his niece, he leaves the safety of his suburban routine to travel far & wide to bring her inheritance back.

A deeply satisfying & redemptive read, of a time long ago, when things were a lot more simple & simple honor was a lot more evident.

Warms your heart, soothes your soul & tells a good story as well!

The last line of this novel tells it all about the protagonist, Keith Stewart: "He was ...supremely happy". Keith was happy because he forsook more renumerative possibilities to do what he wanted to do most; design and write in the arcane field of "miniature mechanics" or model engineering, working out of a machine shop in his basement. In addition he is also a very moral and responsible human being.

In typical Nevil Shute fashion, the book's plot consists of a wonderful, almost believable adventure during which Keith travels to the South Pacific and Washington State to save an inheritance, but it is really a portrait of Keith and how the goodness of ordinary people, personified by the warmly drawn out characters, will conquer all adversity without resorting to too much guile. Besides Keith there is his wife Katie, their niece Janice, errant boat bum Jim Donnelly as well as a kind-hearted lumber magnate, Sol Hirzhorn, and his family. All are good people and the story ends well.

If all this sounds trite, I suppose it is in these cynical times, but that does not prevent "Trustee" from being a marvelous read. I have re-read it many times and, perhaps more importantly, have learned that model engineers like Keith and the magazine he wrote for really exist. Largely as a result of reading this book, I have taken up the hobby myself, including my very own basement workshop, and work on projects taken from magazines similar to the fictitious one Keith wrote for. Reason enough to love a work of fiction.

Keith Stewart lives quietly in suburban London, working free-lance for a model mechanic magazine. His sister and brother in law have him hide a jewel box aboard their sailboat just before they emigrate to Vancouver. But when the ship goes down in the South Pacific with them both, Keith must not only raise their young daughter, but must seek to retrieve the jewel box from the wreck.

Keith has never before left Britain, and is very much a fish out of water. But there's not that much suspense to this story, as he finds that many people who have read of his work are delighted to help him along.

All the same, it isn't an easy trip for Keith, but it is a far easier one for the reader, with a fine read and memorable characters.

This was Neville Shute's final novel, and perhaps derives much of its mood due to this. Best known for the depressing nuclear holocaust story On the Beach, Shute wrote this as a celebration of the simple pleasures in life. The protagonist Keith is an unassuming, married, but childless, middle-aged man living in suburban London (Ealing) with his working wife. He has forsaken a more lucrative engineering career in order to pursue his love of miniature modeling and a very meager income as a columnist for "Miniature Mechanic" magazine. When his sister and brother-in-law die in a shipwreck near Tahiti, he becomes the guardian and trustee for his 10-year-old niece. Next thing you know, Keith, who has never left the country, has to find a way to make his way to a remote Pacific island to recover a box of diamonds that was on the wreck. Shute writes convincingly of the things nautical and engineering Keith encounters on his adventure. Along the way he is aided by a somewhat improbable number of people who know him from his reputation in he world of miniature mechanics. It teeters on being trite and corny, but ultimately works as a celebration of karma. Keith has been a good, selfless man, and so other good, selfless men are willing to help him--and he ends up doing what he loves. At the end of his life, Shute returned to this basic message on how to live and love life, and it works.

This is a wonderful book. A simple story about an unassuming man who has turned his avocation of fabricating small machines into a modest occupation that makes his everyday existence a pleasure for himself and his equally unassuming and good-hearted wife. He decides to embark upon a quest to reclaim his niece's lost inheritance--a treasure chest of diamonds hidden by himself and her father on the wrecked ship in which both her wealthy upper-class parents were killed. He does not want the diamonds for himself but the education and future of his niece which he will not be otherwise able to supply on his own rather meager income. So the hero starts out on a trip half way around the world with not enough money and no legitimate assurance that he will even make it back alive, much less win the prize. He knows it is a long shot. But, with the encouragement of his wife who will hold down the fort at home, he embarks upon this high-seas, dangerous journey simply because he thinks it's the right thing to do. He wouldn't feel right if he didn't try. That he might fail is not the important thing. This very rational, prudent man who has lived what many would consider a rather dull life of habit and order will now put all his trust in the enexpected and taste a life of risk and adventure. Very inspiring.

If you are a model engineer or into building small engines, this will probably become your favorite book as it is mine. I bought this copy just so I could loan it to others to read. It has no sex, no violence--just a good, inspiring story line about how the efforts of one man working in obscurity turn out to have influenced many more people than he thought. The hero builds small engines and writes articles on them for an English model engineering magazine. As trustee for his late brother's daughter, he sets out to recover her inheritence, which was lost at sea in the Pacific. Travelling on virtually no budget he meets some interesting characters along the way with the common bond that they are impressed with his tiny engines or know of him through his articles and admire him greatly. The author is actually a real-life engineer who is best known for his rather dark book of post-nuclear disaster, "On the Beach," but this is a much more uplifting tale that is equally well written.

The fascination of Nevil Shute's stories have always been difficult to explain. His hero is everything that we already are. No piece of him is especially surprising, yet he keeps us reading. Every revelation of character makes us turn a say, "Yeah...I know somebody like that." or "I feel that way too."

In _Trustee from the Toolroom_, the simple actions of Keith Stewart to fulfill his promise to family reveal more about our experience as ordinary humans than most other fiction thrust on us today. Keith does what we envy in others or take pride in ourselves: he remains honest. Yes, it is slow and utterly normal. But isn't it refreshing to read something that makes waking up every ordinary day and living honestly a hero's journey? After all else is scraped away, we are just like Keith Stewart.

While maintaining this normality in character, Nevil Shute captivates us with the heroic in this, his last novel.

If you like to have people you admire as central characters in a novel, and if you like to see them overcome their difficulties you will like this account of a modest but very gifted man who has good things happen to help him overcome the hurdles before him. This is a book which will leave you feeling good about the world and the book. I enoyed it greatly, and think it is a winner, tho there is nothing abstruse about it, except the knowledge which Keith Stewart, and various people he meets up with, have and use to have things come out as you will very much want them to.

This is the story of a man who dedicated his thought and efforts to the work he loved and how his own selfish pursuit created a world-wide circle of good will and benevolence. This delightful tale shows how the bond of common values transcends vast differences among men.

In a literary novel we have the protagonist, but for the Nevil Shute's Trustee from the Toolroom, I prefer to call Keith Stewart an unlikely hero. An overweight freelance writer for, what one would think, an obscure miniature machine magazine, Stewart designs and builds working models in his basement for near hand-to-mouth earnings. Stewart has never left his patch of England; while he and his wife, having no children, live a quiet life, happily going along, when one day he helps his brother-in-law prepare a safe in the bottom of a small sailing ship.

The brother-in-law, a well off individual, with a landed gentry background, and Stewart's sister are off on a cruise to America on their own, while Stewart and his wife take care of their niece, Janice. Life goes wrong when the sister and her husband are killed in a storm at sea near Tahiti.

Stewart and his wife learn that the child, which is now permanently in their care, has no inheritance. The suspicion is that the inheritance, now in the form of diamonds, is in the safe on a ruin sailing ship, the remains of which are sitting on a reef in the South Pacific.

Here the story really gets underway. Stewart, the man that's gone nowhere, is faced with the daunting task of leaving his insular world of miniature models and journeying to a reef in the middle of the pacific. This is when we and Steward learns how insignificant he is not. This is the key to the story, and I don't what to divulge much more, because the depth of Stewart's own life is revealed to him and amazes him as much as it will please any reader.

If you've read Shute before, you know his writing is straight forward and is laced with technical explains, which his characters always delve into, because Shute himself was an incredibly talented man.

Why the four stars and not five? Well, there are moments when the continued repetition of Steward's motives for his journey clutters up the narrative, and if they could've been pared down just a little, the story would've been tightened up. The ending was not bad, matter of fact, it was happy, that's reasonable, because that's the way life can be, but the true resolution, the retrieval of the Janice's inheritance, did not work out well in the way the story was constructed. At over three hundred pages, I think Shute was pushed to finish by the length of the story already. But don't get me wrong, as the reader I was continually moving with Stewart and pulling for him.

Read it. You'll enjoy the time spent.