Jean Paget is good-looking and level-headed, but apparently unremarkable she will not be drawn on her wartime experiences, beyond saying that she spent three years as ‘a sort of prisoner-of war’ in Malaya, where she grew up. On Macfadden’s death in 1948, Strachan has the task of tracking down the heir to his substantial estate, who proves to be a 27-year-old typist living in Ealing.
Strachan begins with a slow, pedantic account of how he came to draw up the will of a Scottish invalid called Douglas Macfadden. A tale as dramatic as this, Shute’s instinct must have told him, requires no flights of fancy or embellishment. It’s true that he set little store by poetic description, but one thing he did understand was tone, and perhaps his most inspired decision in writing A Town like Alice was his choice of narrator: a dry old stick of a solicitor called Noel Strachan. The dust-jacket of my second edition proclaims Shute’s gifts as a ‘storyteller’ – which usually implies ‘not much of a stylist’. And though I have now read it half a dozen times, and come to love its combination of far-flung romance, desperate endurance and old-fashioned stoicism, there remains a conundrum at the heart of it which continues to tantalize me, like a stubborn morsel of crabmeat wedged in the corner of a claw.
How, I wondered, could a town possibly be like a person? When I eventually discovered that ‘Alice’ was short for Alice Springs, a remote settlement in the Australian Outback, I was still baffled – for from what I knew of the plot, the novel’s main focus was wartime Malaya.
I first heard of Nevil Shute’s A Town like Alice (1950) when I was a schoolboy, and long before I read it I was fascinated by the title.
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