Acronyms and technical military, nautical and aeronautical terms, as well as terms for weaponry and arms, frequent the text. This adds a sense authenticity. The author doesn’t define these terms but with the help of adjacent explanations lay readers come to understand what is meant. The is well done. However, in expressing things several times and in different ways there is quite a bit of repetition which is at times annoying. Too often a reader is told of events rather than experiencing and living them firsthand, as they occur. This is what you need to know about the author’s writing style.

I love Shute. Everything I have read of his has been better than the 5-stars I was allowed to give it. I had not intended to read this right now, having just read Pied Piper, but Bob convinced me it would be stupid to push this off so that I could read something I could not be assured would be as satisfying. The book’s central theme is about the repercussions of war after its end. It is not true that deaths cease at war’s end. People are forever changed by their experiences. There is an exhilaration to war. Look at the appeal war literature has on readers. Those participating in wars may become entranced with the idea that they are doing something vital, something important. Guilt plays in too. After a war, many have difficulty readjusting to civilian life. These are the themes dealt with in the book. He certainly takes a similar approach in Requiem. The writing can be corny sometimes and feel a bit like a 1940s film with everyone talking in a rapid, clipped manner where every word is focused on moving the storyline forward. It can make for some one dimensional characters. But the odd thing is, I love this about Shute’s book.All of this plays into Shute's story and is worked beautifully into a story of love, war, regret and family. While the author pulls no punches, he does not dramatize, he tells it like it was, laying bare the hearts of the characters. Even knowing of the eventual end of the pivotal character does not take away from the dramatic tension Shute creates throughout the story. He brings us to slow realizations in a wonderfully artistic manner, dawn breaking finally revealing the true depth of each character.

Albeit sad, I can accept Janet’s inability to love and marry anyone other than Bill Duncan, Alan’s brother. With Alan’s return home, that she chooses suicide makes sense to me too. Alan’s love for Janet never felt genuine to me, and his decision to marry Viola Dawson isn’t drawn convincingly either. It's a simply, but beautifully written story of the heroism and staunch optimism of the British people during the dark times they faced during the early and middle 1940s. One of my all-time favorites. Nevil Shute was extremely popular in the 1940s and 50s. He wrote in a straightforward, highly readable style on subjects that he knew about. Thus it is not surprising that there are quite a few technical references in this book, especially to equipment used in the Normandy landings of 1944 (Shute, an officer in the RNVR, was actually present at D-Day) but these are easily comprehensible to the ordinary listener. The atmosphere and tension of those weeks before the invasion is very well caught. The "wren" in the book’s title refers to those enlisted in the women's branch of the UK's Royal Navy Service. A requiem is the religious ceremony performed for the dead. It can be more loosely referred to as an act or token of remembrance for a deceased, and so Requiem for a Wren is to be interpreted as a token of remembrance for the fictional character, Wren Janet Prentice.The slower parts of this story might have worked better for me if this audiobook had a different narrator. I must admit that I found myself laughing at the narrator at times, particularly his heavy upper crust English accent which was so inappropriate for this particular book. His reading was also very monotone with little to no inflection of his voice. While I accept that guilt is often experienced, I think it is drawn too far in the case of two central characters, both Janet Prentice and Alan Duncan. That Janet takes upon herself the guilt for seven war deaths, feeling she must pay in kind by losing seven she loves dearly, and that Alan feels guilty for Janet’s suicide stretches the power of guilt too far. Reading through Janet's diaries, Alan learns that she came to Australia to find Bill's family, and that she still feels she must atone for the deaths of the seven men. He realizes that, after Bill's death, he and Janet, though never meeting, came to love each other, and ought to be the master and mistress of the family property; but now, the ghosts of Bill and Janet make it impossible for him to stay. But then he learns, as if from the ghosts, that he should "do the job for them"; and there is a woman in England, Viola, the other former Wren, who he should marry. Lccn 70552632 Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9810 Ocr_module_version 0.0.7 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA400068 Openlibrary_edition