Most Secret:(written in 1942, but published in 1945) tells the story of four British officers, who take part in three raids off the Breton coast around Douarnenez. Nearly half of the book is taken up with the back-stories to the four main characters, each with good reason to hate the Germans. At first, I thought it was slowing the story down, with too much extraneous information. However, it meant you understood them, felt for them, by the time the actual raids took place. Shute had made them 'live', in that the reader felt part of the mission.
Charles Simon, half French and half English, but passionately fond of England, having been to public school there; desperate to be an English officer. Charles worked in ferro-concrete, whose focus on his work meant his marriage to an English girl lasted less than a year. Witnessing German brutality at first hand in France, he is a willing listener to an old French priest who talks to him: The Germans are not people like ourselves. They are creatures of the Devil, vowed to idolatry, and followers of Mithras...Lies and deceit in every form...and all the petty minor sins that weaken character these are the things that Germany has sown in Frenchmen... these are the weapons with which Germany fights wars. First they destroy the souls of men and then they occupy the country... they come from Satan and his messenger at Berchtesgaden. Charles' back-story takes up 50 pages. Towards the end of the novel, before giving himself up to the Germans, Charles says to the priest: We are lonely people, father, without homes or wives or families - not quite like other men.
Oliver Boden, son of a wool spinner in Bradford, spends most of his young life with Marjorie, whom he marries in October 1938. Two years later, she is killed in London during the Blitz. He was terribly, terribly bitter after the raid. His mission from then on is to kill Germans, depth charging U-boats, picturing how the hull would split, the lights go out, and the air pressure rise intolerably round trapped and drowning men. That was the line of thought that gave him most real pleasure at that time.
Michael Rhodes, son of a doctor in Derby, who died when he was fifteen. Shy and awkward with women, colour blind, and bitter at having to put down a faithful dog, Ernest, in order, as he thought, to join the RNVR. Later he cares for a rabbit, Geoffrey, which is killed in another German air raid; the body was unmarked, the fur unruffled... it was just another little drop to swell the flood of misery that comes from war.
The Wren, Barbara Wright, whom Rhodes gets close to (and later engaged to) poignantly muses: I suppose someday there'll be a world again where people can live quietly, and fall in love, and get married, and have fun. Where you can keep a rabbit or a dog - or a husband, and not have to stand by and see them killed. Where you can think of other things than burning oil, and rain, and darkness and black bitter hate.
Lieutenant John Colvin, older than the others, married five or six times, with a marine career that had taken in Chile, Panama, the West Indies, and whose one link with his most recent 'wife' was a watch with her name on the back. He brought to the plan his story of a flame thrower used by a rum-runner during Prohibition off Cape Cod, back in 1927.
Each man brings different and very relevant skills. Not until page 147 (out of 287) does the first of the raids take place, using the French tug-boat Geneviève, equipped with a very nasty flame-thrower to destroy German Raumboots. Thanks to our, by now, deep knowledge of the four men - their characters, their bitterness, what made them 'tick' - it feels as if we are with them through all the vicissitudes of the next few dangerous months. The reader suffers with them, understands the virtual martyrdoms of, first Oliver Boden, then Charles Simon; and shares the hopes of Rhodes and Barbara, Colvin and Junie for whatever the future might hold
It is a book very much of its times - in 1941, when the action is set, it was not certain that the Allies would win the war; but the tide was slowly turning. Ordinary men and women, like those portrayed in the novel, were able to demonstrate, by psychological as well as military means, that the Germans would one day be beaten back. At one point, Shute writes, Bitterness had warped most of the rest of them. The novel does not paste in cardboard characters but portrays 'real' people.The reader can totally understand their pain as well as their bravery.
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