In the Wet

Book by Nevil Shute First Australian edition (Heinemann) In the Wet is a novel by Nevil Shute that was first published in the United Kingdom in 1953. It contains many of the typical elements of a hearty and adventurous Shute yarn such as flying, the future, mystic states, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Plot summary The story is opened by its initial narrator – an Anglican priest in the Bush Brotherhood named Roger Hargreaves – who describes his ordinary circumstances in a large parish of the Queensland outback in 1953. As part of his duties, he has to minister to the dying and this brings him into contact with an aged, alcoholic, opium-smoking, diseased, ex-pilot and ex-ringer named Stevie. Caught in Stevie's squalid cabin in a heavy rainy season, Hargreaves struggles with recurring malaria whilst on deathwatch for Stevie. As both men are in altered mental states the story shifts and Stevie becomes David 'Nigger' Anderson, a decorated member of the Royal Australian Air Force, telling his story to Hargreaves. But this is a story set 30 years in the future, in 1983. David Anderson is a quadroon, of mixed European and Aboriginal ancestry. As a first rate pilot he