So Disdained

Political and diplomatic background

When the book was written, Germany was disarmed under the Versailles Treaty, Hitler was still a marginal figure in the politics of the Weimar Republic and, as the book makes clear, the major political and military threat was perceived to be from the Soviet Union, then in the first flush of success of the October Revolution.

The book describes a state of cold war between Britain and the Soviet Union, though the term did not yet exist. Many elements which later became familiar in the background of 1950s and 1960s thrillers — an accelerated arms race, the development of secret weapons, intensive espionage and counter-espionage around these weapons projects, political and social subversion, and the tendency to promote right-wing dictatorships as allies against Communism - are already present in this book, three decades earlier. (This might have prompted the decision to republish it in 1951.)

Specifically, the book was written in the direct aftermath of the 1926 General Strike which seemed to put the spectre of a Socialist Revolution — highly unwelcome to people of Shute's persuasion — on the British agenda.

Plot summary

Peter L. Moran, the narrator, is agent to Lord Arner. Driving home after a dinner in Winchester, he picks up Maurice Lenden, who in 1917 had been a fellow pilot in the Royal Flying Corps.

The story tells how Lenden had been flying a photographic espionage mission for the Russians, how he came to be doing that, and discusses the morality of acting as a traitor to his country.

As in Marazan, Shute expresses respect for the Italian Fascist movement of the time.

Philip Stenning (the first person narrator of Marazan) appears again in this novel, once again portrayed as a 'rough diamond' with a debatable sense of moral justice.

Sympathetic portrayal of Fascists

Shute's evident sympathy to Italian Fascism is explained in a passage in the book. In the seventh chapter Moran, wounded from his crash landing in Italy, considers his options and comes to the conclusion that "I had to get allies. I was up against a Bolshevik organization; the most obvious people in Italy to set against the Bolsheviks were the Fascisti."

In the final chapters of the book, Moran meets Captain Fazzini, the local Fascist leader: "I liked the look of him. He was a man of my own age, very tall and straight, and with a tanned, unshaven face. He had a very high forehead, and in some peculiar way he had the look of a leader in spite of his three-days' beard."

When Fazzini had roused his men to raid the secret Communist base, Moran remarks: "His force of Fascisti paraded in the square. It took some time to get them out to parade - they must have all been in bed - but I liked the look of them. They were a fine, straight body of young men, dressed in field-green breeches and black shirts and each armed with a sort of truncheon."

Though equipped with truncheons, the Fascists depicted in the book are not eager to use them on the single Communist captured in the raid. Rather, they interrogate him only verbally and ineffectively, and it is the Englishman Philip Stenning who brutally beats up the prisoner, breaking his arm, to extract information on the fate of Lenden. The Fascist leader Fazzini actually tries to restrain Stenning. Moran (and in effect, Shute) remarks that "I don't think that physical violence to a prisoner was much in Fazzini's line".

By the time the book was republished in 1951, the British public perception of the morality of a Fascist militia leader had considerably changed. Shute's foreword to the 1951 edition, in which he remarks that he changed nothing in the book except "half a dozen outmoded pieces of slang", evidently refers especially to his deciding not to make any change in the favourable depiction of the Fascists.

Author's note, quoted from the 1951 edition

This was the second of my books to be published, twenty-three years ago. It took me nearly three years to write, because I was working as an engineer on the construction of an airship and I wrote only in the evenings in the intervals of more important technical work. It was written through from start to finish twice, and some of it three times.

Clearly, I was still obsessed with standard subjects as a source of drama - spying, detection, and murder, so seldom encountered by real people in real life. Perhaps I was beginning to break loose from these constraints: the reader must judge that for himself.

Shute makes similar comments about rewriting So Disdained in his autobiography Slide Rule (page 78).