Book: On the Beach by Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach over 50 years ago, precisely during the heyday of the Cold War's nuclear arms race.  A brilliant example of counterproductive thinking that would influence such near disasters as the Bay of Pigs invasion, not to mention the release of innumerable films and novels dealing literally and metaphorically with human kind's ability to wipe itself off the face of the earth.   

On the Beach, as novel and film, differs from works like the brilliant novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz, for instance, in that Shute did not choose the relative safety (or creative freedom) of rooting his meditation on nuclear holocaust within the science fiction genre.  Shute chose the heartbreaking and alarmingly mundane real world for his backdrop.  Another difference between On the Beach and so many other fictive post-apocalyptic nightmares is that the action of the story concerns neither the grand conflagration that ends in human extinction nor the way humankind slowly, painfully recovers after a nuclear holocaust.  Instead, the plot explores what, given said holocaust, human extinction would feel like.

Shute focuses on the year or so after the northern hemisphere has annihilated itself through nuclear war.  The resulting cloud of radioactivity slowly, relentlessly creeps south, promising to eventually wipe out all animal life on the planet.  The story occurs in Melbourne, Australia, one of the last large cities to contain life, and it centers around a small group of people: an American submarine captain whose family back home must already have died, an Australian naval officer with a young wife and a new baby daughter, a spirited young Australian woman who dreamed big dreams and now mourns the loss of her future.  

As tales of post-apocalyptic horror go, On the Beach seems extremely quiet. Of course, therein lies its power and resonance.  Dialogue and character, rather than action, drive the plot, for the defining action of the piece has occurred before the novel begins.  The bombs have dropped, the combatant nations have exterminated themselves.  Now the human beings left alive in the southern hemisphere have only to wait.  The story concerns normal human life and the psychology of average people waiting for a guaranteed untimely death; moreover, for a death that will signal the probable end of all human life on earth.  

As Shute imagines it, and I tend to agree with him, people quietly go on being people.  Some anesthetize themselves with drink and wait pathetically for the radioactive cloud to arrive with its sickness.  Some take up dangerous hobbies and pursue them with abandon, perhaps hoping they go out on their own terms before the sickness overtakes them, and likely also managing to feel truly alive before they die.  Others, the great majority, simply go on.  Not naively, as though assured death were not approaching, but determinedly because what else is one supposed to do?  They plant gardens the issue from which they will never eat.  They take courses to prepare themselves for careers they will never pursue.  They go out to lunch and shop.  They take fishing trips and throw parties.  They live until they die.

 

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