Nevil Shute's "Trustee from the Toolroom"

An unusual hero steps out from toolroom

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, and someone we grow to like, very much. He’s an overweight freelance writer for, what one would think to be an obscure miniature machine magazine, Stewart designs and builds working models in his basement for near hand-to-mouth earnings. But he enjoys this life. Stewart has never left his patch of England, and neaer wanted to. He and his wife have no children; they 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 like to divulge too much of any story. I want you to read it for yourself, of course, but what I can say is the depth of Stewart’s own life is revealed to him and amazes him as much as it will please any reader.

If you haven’t read Shute before, well, you should. This story is a fine one to begin with. 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.

I have a caveat or two, nothing serious, but, 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.

Don’t get me wrong, as the reader I was continually moving with Stewart and pulling for him. Our unlikely hero maybe traveling great distances for his niece but he learns that he’s touched the lives of many others.

Read it. You’ll enjoy the time spent. Stewart’s life is simpler, no faster then the postal service or a rotary phone call is made or a phone conversation is made on a tape recorder and transcribed to paper, or a sailing ship glides through the water.