On the Beach
by Nevil Shute
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Book Summary Information
Author: Nevil ShuteEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1983-09-12
ISBN: 0345311485
Number of pages: 278
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of On the Beach
Book Review: "Normalcy" In The Face Of Our Species' Self-Imposed Demise
Summary: 5 Stars
As radiation from a nuclear war that destroyed all life in the northern half of the earth gradually spreads southward to deliver its poison to all who live there, a number of Australians and a handful of Americans who reside among them attempt to continue some facet of normal life, even when the time for all things is nearly done. We learn going into this foreboding novel that at most one year remains to even the most fortunate of those yet alive. We read along as the last of humankind pathetically (or is it with dignity?) plant gardens, play with their children, reform from their alcoholism, fall in love, race cars...the list could go on and on. What must it be like to dwell under these horrible circumstances? What must it do, for instance, to the mind of a devout theist when she sees the deity to whom she has maintained lifelong faith is not going to arrive deus ex machina to save her and make everything right again? What must utter and complete moral hopelessness be like? How horrible must it be to be young and rise each morning knowing the despair that would come with so many hopes lying before you, now impossible to ever fulfill? And what must it be like to be a parent and understand that the children you bought into a terrible world reeling in extremis, will die in a matter of weeks?
On The Beach is not about exploding cities and geo-political confrontations. The war and the nations who fought it are distant, quiet memories, barely of significance. On The Beach is about people, and how those people carry on in the face of a doom they neither created nor can elude. It is one of the darkest works of fiction ever produced, and also one of the finest. If it impacts a jaded modern reader so startlingly, what must it have been like to read this fifty years ago when the very concept of global extinction after nuclear conflict, was new?
A universal, eternal classic of the Cold War era.
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