The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin was published in 1943, while the second world war was still going on. I am quite surprised that publication of this short, vivid and grim novel was allowed under wartime censorship rules, given the rather jaundiced picture it paints of the scientific establishment of that time. The wartime civil service atmosphere is very well caught; they work long hours and weekends with little time off. It is written in a terse, stripped-down, dialogue-heavy style, so that when there is a figure of speech it comes as a surprise.
Complex bureaucracy and office politics figure strongly in this story of a small technical research unit. The Reeves gun is an anti-tank weapon at the experimental stage; the army doesn’t like it, and the narrator, scientist Sammy Rice, has written a report saying it isn’t ready. However, his boss, Waring, and Professor Mair, head of the unit, have already persuaded their minister that the gun is a good idea.
Any consideration as to whether this will eventually be a useful weapon takes second place to a plot to oust Mair. The effectiveness of the gun becomes merely a pretext in the power struggle. The senior scientists and civil servants seem less interested in winning the war than scoring points off each other. Mair tells Sammy that scientists over fifty are not capable of original thinking anymore; it’s all about competing for knighthoods and so on. When Holland, the old soldier, intervenes in a meeting to make a point about the soldiers who will eventually have to use the gun on the battlefield, Sammy thinks he is the first person who has spoken as if they meant what they said.
Sammy is not very good at all this game-playing and career making. He has an artificial foot, a drink problem and a tendency to feel sorry for himself. He rails against “the bloody silly way things were arranged”. He doesn’t realise he is being sounded out as deputy director of the unit and is amazed when the job goes to Waring, the ex-advertising man who knows next to nothing about science, but is good at selling ideas to people.
Sammy is kept more or less on an even keel by his relationship with Susan, Professor Mair’s secretary. They have a ritual to keep Sammy’s drinking under control. She asks him if he would like a whisky and he replies that, no, he wouldn’t.
The real war in which people get killed keeps intruding into this world of farcical meetings and inconclusive conversations. Sammy’s younger brother Dick, is a twice-decorated fighter pilot who volunteers for secret and highly dangerous duty. Sammy has been asked by the engineer officer Captain Stuart to help with the investigation into a booby trap bomb the Germans are dropping, that is responsible for the deaths of several children.
Eventually, two of the bombs are found intact on a west country beach. Sammy tells Stuart to wait until he gets there before starting work. But by the time Sammy’s train gets in, Stuart has gone ahead and been blown up while attempting to defuse the first one. Sammy is a civilian; it was Stuart’s responsibility to do the dangerous part, but for various reasons, Sammy volunteers to defuse the second bomb.
We have now arrived at the novel’s tense, dramatic and unforgettable climax, with Sammy alone on the beach, working painstakingly on the second unexploded bomb, using the notes left by Stuart, giving a running commentary on every move he makes to the control point by telephone, in case he too should be killed. It tends to be this part of the novel that readers remember, despite the fact that it is only one chapter or so. It leaves a very strong impression.
I’m not sure if this novel actually introduced the phrase “back room boys”, to mean wartime scientists. The phrase is usually attributed to Beaverbrook, but I think the novel may have popularised it. The dialogue is full of 1940s expressions, such as “the balloon going up” and “I’ll put you in the picture”.
It was filmed in 1949 by Powell and Pressburger in a black and white expressionist style, I think they altered it a little too much. It’s time for a remake, in colour and widescreen, more faithful to the realism of the book.
The Good Reader 