Hero Minus Heroics

TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM (311 pp.)_A/ew/ Shute--Morrow ($3.95).

The late Nevil Shute took characters of clay and left them shod with steel. Keith Stewart, hero of Shute's posthumous novel, Trustee from the Toolroom, is unassuming to the point of extinction. Keith is past his prime, hard up, pastily pale and running a little to fat. In an ugly mortgaged home in the London suburb of West Baling, he shares teatime monosyllables with his dumpily comfortable wife Katie. Yet Keith is not a nonentity.

He is the backbone of the Miniature Mechanic, a magazine for which he writes articles on the tiny models of locomotives, generators, planes, and assorted engines he himself designs. At the drop of a soldering iron or the wrong twist of a vise, like-minded hobbyists from Havana to Hong Kong lay their problems on the workbench of this toolroom Da Vinci. Patiently, Keith answers each letter. Just as patiently, he seals a little copper box of his sister's "trinkets" in the ballasting of his brother-in-law's yacht, and agrees to take care of the couple's ten-year-old daughter Janice while the pair sails for western Canada via the South Seas.

Steady old Keith has also sealed a bargain with adventure. During a typhoon the yacht smashes up on a coral reef near Tahiti, and Janice's parents are killed. As the child's trustee, Keith pieces together the puzzle of her missing legacy: the box of "trinkets" contained -L-27,000 in diamonds smuggled out of England to dodge currency restrictions. Keith's conscience will not let him rest until he gets a look at the wreckage on that distant coral reef.

The ensuing odyssey is a kind of poor man's around-the-world-in-80-days. There is a low-keyed humor in Keith Stewart's role as a provincial Ulysses, for the West Baling mechanic has never before set eyes on a piece of foreign currency, taken a shower, or been on the water, and he packs his English woolens for the tropics. But Keith's loving care of craft and his fascination with minutiae of technique will win the reader's respect. In the end, though, it is neither tropic adventures nor miniature marvels that generate the fundamental emotion in Trustee from the Toolroom. That comes from giving a small man a big word--trust--to live up to. It was Nevil Shute's enduring conviction that "the job's the thing,'' and that a job well done makes and proclaims the man.

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