In the Wet

Written by Nevil Shute

Narrated by Norman Dietz

An old man lies dying during the rainy season in the Queensland outback. And in the night, slipping in and out of an opium sleep that drifts him towards death, he draws his listener into a tale that opens onto incredible horizons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781461812326

Reviews for In the Wet

[marthajeanne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another really superb book by Shute. I did discover one anomaly this time. David and Rosemary discuss how much fun it would be to plan your own new house, but then they decide to take that opportunity away from the Queen.Obviously this has aged a lot, and doesn't fit with real history. It's still a wonderful piece of writting, though.

[jjmcgaffey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

OK, not what I was expecting. The frame is a very Nevil Shute outback story - the old drunkard, who clearly has a story and equally clearly isn't telling anyone what it is; a deathbed with some opium involved - and then the story veers off in very interesting directions. It's SF - it's the future, for the characters and for the author (1970 is sometime in the past, though I don't think I ever figured out exactly what year it was. 1990s or 2000s, I think). The old man "remembers", in detail (somewhat excessive detail, when you think of it as a memory or dream, though it fits the story) events of this future year, and what England and Australia (and Canada) have become by then. It's retrofuturism now - that's not what happened, in several angles - but it makes me want to study the situation as it actually was when the story was written to see what Shute was seeing as trends. The characters in the future are interesting - I was particularly taken by the, I think accurate, level of racism. The main character is "Nigger" Anderson - he's a quadroon, a quarter black, and he's more sensitive to it than most of those around him, including his love interest. I think his chosen nickname was rather clever - by calling himself that, he defuses it as a slur (how can anyone insult him by calling him by the name he told them to call him?). He's a pilot, and we get the blow-by-blow of several flights ("he adjusted the throttle, and altered the angle of the ailerons..."); there's also (as I said) a lot of politics and social/economic discussion. And it's still a good adventure. Shute neatly sneaked in the epilogue - what became of these characters after the story was over - before the beginning of the flash-forward, too - nice. Overall, not what I was expecting - which is what I've come to expect from Shute. Lovely.

[meredy_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Six-word review: Adventure-romance as future political history.Extended review:It took me a while to get oriented to the time frame of Nevil Shute's twentieth novel. I kept looking back at the copyright page to check the date: first published in 1953. If I had read it in 1953, it would have been obvious that references to coins minted in the 1960s and 1970s, to political events in England in the eighties (did he mean eighteen-80s? I wondered at first), and, startlingly, to a grown Prince Charles and his wife and two sons, were speculatively futuristic. At the time, the young Queen Elizabeth was newly crowned, and her two eldest children were preschoolers.But, lacking experience with Shute's fiction (one previous title) and being unsure of twentieth-century British political history and the structure of the Commonwealth, as well as being a bit preoccupied with my own family matters, I missed some clues.The storyline: In a remote area of Australia during the monsoon season, a pastor named Hargreaves is called to the bedside of a delirious alcoholic whose death agonies are being eased by opium. Feverish with malaria himself, the pastor drifts in and out of lucidity and either hears or does not hear the dying man recount his life story. Deftly handled transitions blend Hargreaves's wavering consciousness with that of the old man, who reveals a history as a pilot and captain of a special aircraft that provided elite transport service to the middle-aged queen and the royal family. In that capacity he facilitated a dramatic rescue from an attempted assassination. A tender love story intertwines with his aeronautic career.What brought about the drastic change from "then" to "now"? How did the bold, heroic pilot become the wreck of a man we see in the frame tale? I raced through the last fifty pages to find out. The answer was . . . nothing like what I was expecting. I really missed something. As the explanation gradually dawned on me, I realized that as a reader I had simply not done Shute's work justice. I had seen the allegorical aspects, I thought, but I hadn't understood the paradox. That happens sometimes. I owe Shute another read.I very much enjoyed and admired the evocative style, the rich descriptions, the psychological insights, and especially the dreamlike blurring of the line between perception and illusion. Some of the political aspects were especially provocative and seem to have given rise to some thought and discussion in the years since publication.One word of caution. I found it very difficult to read past the casual racism that was taken for granted at the time that the book was written. The main character is three-fourths white and one-fourth Aborigine--a quadroon, as he labels himself. His mixed race is a factor in the plot. I generally manage to read books in the light of their own historical and cultural context and not blame people for seeing things as their neighbors did rather than as they (presumably) would see them now. Even so, the main character's chosen nickname (it begins with N, and it's a word we don't use) forces it in front of us on page after page after page. I'm not in favor of bowdlerizing fiction, but I couldn't help wishing for a version that substituted something innocuous for this character's name.

[stuart_taylor-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was glad to finish this book and that says it all really. First published in 1953 (I believe), this book is meticulously researched but very leisurely paced with plenty of repetitive padding. Written in the language of the time, its references to half-castes and boongs and abos are considered racially unacceptable today and the central character's nickname: "Nigger", underlines this. If you read this book therefore, you should do so in the spirit of its vintage and not become offended at expressions that were considered okay at the time.

The first person rendition of the tale in the voice of a troubled country priest in the Australian bush in the 1930s had me hooked from the start, and despite almost quitting the long winded story in more than one place, the well drawn characters, authentic scenery and subsequent third person storytelling successfully kept me persevering to the end.

The plot revolves around the priest's encounter with the local drunk and opium user in the character of an impecunious old man called Stevie. Stevie lives out of town with an enigmatic Chinese man who one day arrives unexpectedly to get the priest (who is suffering a bad recurrence of Malaria himself), and the town hospital's nursing sister to attend Stevie who is mortally ill. Traveling as best they can through the Australian rainy season where the tracks are flooded for months and infested with crocodiles, the nurse loses her medical bag and they find Stevie in the Chinaman's shack, pain wracked and delirious with opium. Without medication or kerosene to light the shack they spend the night dosing Stevie with opium for pain relief and when the priest is alone with him, the dying man reveals a bizarre story set in the ghostly voices of people from a future world.

[bridgey_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel is written with separate storylines, with the first covering around the first 60 pages and last 20.This first story details the life of an elderly priest who has been assigned a parish in the Australian outback. While visiting the locals he is introduced to the local drunkard Stevie. The pair form an odd sort of relationship which inevitable leads to the priest being called to Stevie's bedside when he falls seriously ill (during the 'wet' season' which is where the title comes from). In the night Stevie in a half delirious state starts to tell of his past life. Meanwhile the priest also falls into a fever as the damp has caused his malaria to resurface. The only problem is that Stevie’s 'past' life is actually set in the future. His name has now become David 'Nigger' Anderson. A quadroon Australian air force pilot. The second storyline is set 20+ years in the future and shows how Shute envisages England’s fate. Socialism is rife, there has been a mass exodus of people to other commonwealth countries and the government is against the funding of Royalty. Meanwhile the other commonwealth countries are flourishing; this seems to be particularly attributed to the multiple vote system (this is where a person is given additional votes for a variety of things). Britain is looked upon as a backward country with socialism and the one vote system being the main cause. Shute over pins the tale with a love story of Anderson and the Queen's Secretary Rosemary. Both parties coming from different countries which allow a balanced view of the world. As normal with Shute both main characters have a very high moral stance and put work and duties before their personal & romantic interests. I suppose that my own ignorance hampered my enjoyment of the middle story, I had to look up a lot of the politics including the basis of socialism but Shute’s writing allows the book to flow well enough. The first part of the book with the priest I enjoyed a lot more that the middle section, the love interest seemed to drag the plot out a bit too much.All in all I enjoyed the book, but feel it was not as good as 'On the Beach' and would advise anyone new to start there as an introduction to the author. Easily recommendable though and worth a read.

[jenneb_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a weird one. Most of the book takes place in 1983 (it was written in '53) but it took me little while to figure that out, since apparently nothing had really changed in 30 years except that airplanes go faster, and England is still under rationing, and Australia has a new political system. (Multiple voting, where you can earn extra votes for various things like education or experience overseas or raising a family)

This is basically what I call a hobbyhorse novel (like the Da Vinci Code or the Celestine Prophecy) where the author has some cool idea they want you to know about so they think up some story to illustrate the idea. (Which in this case is The Evils of Socialism, or, How Australia Is Awesome and The English Are Losers.)

Still, it's by Nevil Shute, so it's crazy readable and there's lots of stuff about airplanes.
Also, it was timely with all the Queensland flooding lately, because that's what the title refers to.

And finally, just to warn you, the main character's nickname is the n-word, and they use it all. the. time.

[bcquinnsmom · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very strange book. I would recommend it to people who are interested in reincarnation or who are into looking at books that in the story expressed prophetic (and some not so prophetic) visions of the future.brief synopsis:Written in 1952, In the Wet is situated mainly in England but starts out in Australia. The local parish priest goes out to an isolated house to attend to the dying of the local town drunk and ne'er do well named Stevie. (For some reason, the blurb on the bookcover gives his name as Georgie, and I was so dumb I kept waiting for Georgie to appear in the story!). Stevie is being tended by a Chinese man, Liang Shih, who raises & sells fresh veggies to the locals, and stereotypically he is an opium smoker. The priest & the sister who came with him decide that if Stevie needs the opium to help him with his pain, so be it, so he smokes a few pipefuls while he's dying. The priest himself isn't in such great shape; he gets hit with another round of recurring malaria and is suffering from fever while he sits holding Stevie's hand. So the priest asks Stevie if he has a wife or anyone they can contact & Stevie throws out the name "Rosemary." He begins to tell the priest about Rosemary, and from there comes out the story that is the major thrust of this book -- it is the story of David Anderson who insists on being called "Nigger" by his friends and serves in the Royal Australian Air Force as the pilot to the Royal Family. Now you could chalk this up to the fact that Stevie's totally stoned, but the strange part is that Anderson's story takes place in the future, and that a lot of things that Stevie tells just frankly haven't happened at the time in which the novel is set.So, you could argue that In the Wet is Shute's "prophecies" about England & the entire British Commonwealth. It is also a look at the fate of the Queen and the royal family, almost in an alternate setting -- there have been three wars; England has suffered under thirty years of socialist misrule; mass out-migration by British people to other countries of the Commonwealth, which stand in contrast to the shabby vision of England as flourishing & prosperous places to be. I liked this book. I was admittedly a little taken aback and to be honest, a little put off by the use of Anderson's nickname and I think that this factor got in the way of my reading, but then again, the book was written originally in 1952 so I guess I can overlook that. I thought the characterizations were good -- a little stereotypical, but again, probably a product of the times. The story was intriguing & kept me reading.