On the Beach by Nevil Shute Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of On the Beach
Book Review: Amazingly realistic
Summary: 5 Stars
Could very will be an accurate prediction of what will happen. Gets a person to thinking about the choices made today.Book Review: An Excellent Concept
Summary: 4 Stars
It's too bad that this book suffers so much from lackluster writing. The story is moving, engaging, and heartbreakingly sad. It really makes you wonder what you'd want to do if you know there were only a few weeks left, and how you would feel as the end approached. I found it very difficult to put this book down once I had begun, and very difficult to put it out of my mind once I had finished. The characters are real and believable - very important to a novel of this sort. While it is unfortunate that the author could have used a grammer manual, this is still a book well worth reading.Book Review: An interesting vision of the end of life as we know it.
Summary: 4 Stars
Nevil Shute gives us the unique opportunity to be a fly on the wall of a community that has the distinction of being the last community left on earth. How or why that community comes to this distinction is nowhere near as important as how it deals with that distinction. On the Beach is a tour de force of emotions and feelings felt by realistic characters as the last six months of human life on earth is played out in a large Australian city; that because of its southern location has managed to survive a worldwide nuclear holocaust. Now it must face what the rest of the world has already experienced. The inescapable radiation that is drifting down from the already dead northern hemisphere. The story, although science fiction, is of the individuals that must come to grips with who they were, who they are now, and what they will do, now that the end is almost inevitable.
Mr. Shute is very good at weaving a story even though it was more plausable when it was written over thirty years ago. But his real genius lies in the timeless account of the many individuals we are introduced to, and are slowly dying with. There is no real pain, only that which we each create as we live and eventually face death. This community is a mirror we see ourselves in, and the view may be eye opening indeed, for we are not out from under the nuclear dragon yet. A timeless tale.Book Review: Applicable in Any Time
Summary: 5 Stars
It took me 60 pages to realize this book had been written over forty years ago; and then, only at the casual mention of a date. I found just about every issue in this book to be one of today also. The threat of nuclear weapons, wars in far away countries, and the viewpoints of the people. This book is timeless, and will continue to be so until nuclear weapons are completely lost or we blow ourselves up. The characters seemed very real. Their reactions to the forcasted time when radiation sickness was to strike were varied and extremely interesting. I was especially intrigued by the widespread instinct towards something like conscious denial, i.e. the planting of gardens for the following spring and such. I found the basic tone of this book to be similar to 1984, though not focused on the government, simply civilians in post-nuclear conditions. Anyway, the basic story line is that the northern hemisphere was is mostly void of any live whatsoever from a complicated nuclear war and the south (focusing on Australia here) is slowly catching the radiation. The time left to live is able to be forcasted approximately. Mostly, people tend to stay in their homes and the strict rules of society break down.
Book Review: Arguably the most significant of the nuclear holocaust novels
Summary: 5 Stars
"On the Beach" was one of the first novels to describe what the aftermath of a nuclear war would be like, although the genre of post-apocalyptic novels goes back at least to Robert Cromie's "The Crack of Doom" in 1895. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martians used radium bullets in 1912's "A Princess of Mars" and Upton Sinclair's 1924 novel "The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000" involved atomic weapons. J.B. Priestly's "The Doomsday Men" in 1938 used radioactive material to disrupt the earth's crust. There was a nuclear war in the background of George Orwell's "1984," and the same can be said for the Ray Bradbury collection of short stories, "The Martian Chronicles."
Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" was published in 1957, which was the same year that the Soviets launched Sputnik and Nikita Khrushchev boasted of a super bomb that could melt the polar icecaps. That might explain why this became the most prominent nuclear war novel of the decade, if not for that entire generation. Shute quotes T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" on the title page with the famous lines "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper," and indeed the novel is not about surviving the war but awaiting the end of the world. Given what we now know about nuclear winter, Shute's pessimism is actually somewhat understated, but that does not make it any the less disturbing.
"On the Beach" is set in Australia, two years after the war of which all anybody knows is that it put so much radioactive fallout into the atmosphere that there are eight months left before it reaches Down Under, where humanity is making its last stand. Unlike books like "Alas, Babylon" by Pat Frank in 1959, which deal primarily with how people try to keep on living civilized lives in the wake of an all-out nuclear exchange, "On the Beach" is about facing the inevitable end. Jonestown was still a couple of decades away and the story of the mass suicides at Massada was a minor historical footnote, so when the book was published there was nothing to color the horror of a continent of human beings choosing to end their lives with pills rather than succumb to the slow death by radiation poisoning (for that matter, there was not an active cultural debate on euthanasia either). There might not be anything more unrealistic in the novel than the idea that the scientific inevitable of the coming radiation is universally accepted. Yet that is a major factor in creating the depressing nature of the novel.
The focus of the novel is on a group of characters. Scientist John Osborne provides the necessary scientific details while tuning his racing car for the world's last Grand Prix. Peter and Mary Holmes are spending their final days taking care of their baby daughter and planning a garden they will never live to see. Their friend Moira Davidson chooses to sedate herself by constantly drinking, until she meets Dwight Towers, captain of the U.S.S. Scorpion, which makes him the highest ranking officer in what is left of the U.S. Navy. The two are able to provide some comfort for each other, but Towers still heeds the call to duty. When a mysterious message is received, being transmitted from Seattle where it is assumed every one is dead, Towers takes his submarine back to see if there is still reason to hope as time runs out.
Part of the problem with this novel is that most readers come to it after seeing the powerful 1959 film made by director Stanley Kramer, with its haunting use of the song "Waltzin' Matilda" and its insistent warning that "It's Not Too Late, Brother!" Shute's characters are much less compelling on the page and the screenwriters were remarkably faithful to many of the key elements of the novel so you do not really get the sense of reading it to get more of the story. There are those who complain that what little Shute has to saw about the war and its weapons of mass destruction does not make sense, but as was the case with the television movie "The Day After" such concerns are negligible because both narratives need the war to allow them to tell their stories. Paying attention to the details definitely misses the larger picture here.
Ultimately, "On the Beach" is more important historically than it is critically. This is not great literature, but it inspired many of the post-nuclear war novels that followed, such as Peter Bryant's "Two Hours to Doom" (which later became "Dr. Strangelove"), Helen Clarkson's "The Last Day," and John Brunner's "The Brink." If you have to choose between the two, watch the movie rather than read the book. But if you are a student of this genre, then you have to read this book simply because of its impact in this field. It is for that reason that I round up on this one.