On the Beach by Nevil Shute Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of On the Beach
Book Review: My only friend is darkness
Summary: 5 Stars
The basic story is that Albania sends a plane with another country's markings to bomb the U.S. and we retaliate. However this is not a pacifist (don't build bombs book). This is not a sci-fi book. It could be a speculative fiction or just speculative.
The story begins after the war is completed and radiation is now covering the world. Australia is the last place to be covered. You read how different people are about to meat their end, some with hope, others with reckless abandon. Still there are those like the US sub commander Dwight Towers is loyal to his country to the end by not allowing U.S. property in the end to fall into the hands of the Aussies.
The book was written in the Cold War Era environment. So many people think that it is about countries and war; others think this story is some anti war story. The reality is that it is a study of people meeting a sure end and how they react. Other readers will balk at the actions of the people in this story; yet when they meet the same situation we will see how realistic the characters are. Still others will balk at the predictability of the characters. Still this is how many people get over a crisis by being predictable. It is these characteristics that make this novel timeless. Someone else must think so or they would not have made an updated version for our not too distant future.
Book Review: On The Beach
Summary: 2 Stars
I was very impressed with the shipping time for the book. However, there was an obvious scar down the entire length of the front cover. It looked as though someone had taken a razor down the front cover and just cut through the first layer of the cover. While I was very satisfied with the book itself (it's one of my favorites), I must acknowledge the severe damage done to the book - it really is sub-par.Book Review: On the Beach
Summary: 1 Stars
This is not well written. It is the slowest moving, one of the most boring post apocalyptic books I have ever read. Very disappointed and definitely will NOT recommend this book to anyone I like. Bought it on reviews found here. Will not trust THAT anymore!Book Review: On the Beach: A sermon to the Cold War generation
Summary: 4 Stars
Other reviews give a synopsis, so I'll skip that and go straight to an analysis/critique.
I first read Nevil Shute's On the Beach when I was a teenager--about the same time as I read Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon--and I've retained a morbid fascination with it ever since. As science fiction it's not all that great, since it isn't really SF at all. Instead, it is more of an allegory with a heavy touch of absurdism thrown in. Think about it: the denizens of a functioning civilization go about their business with near-normality, behaving one minute as if everything is fine while in the next acknowledging (usually with a large degree of detachment) that a sword is hanging over their heads. This description fits both the book and the actual nuclear/Cold War world of the late 1950s. The only difference is that in the book the blade is already, and inescapably, whistling downwards, while in the real world (and this is Shute's point) the danger might be avoided, if people act right away.
Indeed, Shute goes to great pains to get his original readers to identify with the characters and civilization in On the Beach. The Australian setting is accessible to the English speaker, as a South American or African setting wouldn't be. Aside from the gasoline shortage, which he mentions cursorily on occasion, the characters seem discommoded almost not at all by the war (Moira has to darn Dwight's socks; Dwight has to drink Australian whiskey), and Shute greatly downplays even the travel problems, making them seem only a modest inconvenience. Government and the market both appear to function normally, only beginning to falter a bit at the very end. In fact, most people behave even in the final days as if everything were going to continue. A clerk insists on giving Peter Holmes a receipt for a purchase even though the store is about to shut down; the admiral discusses in some detail the reimbursement procedure that an admittedly-nuked Washington, D.C. will follow for the Australian upkeep of the U.S. submarine even as radiation sickness forces him to bolt for the bathroom. These people know the end of the world is days, even hours, away; they aren't deluding themselves; but still, they can't let go. This fabric of functionality and forced normality makes the world of On the Beach resonate with the real Cold War world: in each the danger, while quite real, is remote from everyday circumstance, leading to an almost schizophrenic existence. (Think "Duck and Cover" commercials airing during a "Leave it to Beaver" episode and you get the idea.)
The characters' ultimate, and universal, reaction to the approaching end of the world further strengthen the allegorical nature of the book. British apocalyptic fiction has always been more fatalistic and pessimistic than its American counterpart, and in no case is this more true than in On the Beach, which is perhaps the most devastating work of its kind. Shute's post-holocaust characters--in fact the entire civilization--simply give up. From an American perspective--the sort that produced the contemporary Alas, Babylon--this is frustrating and unrealistic. To paraphrase a statement of Colonel Graff in another famous American SF work, Ender's Game, our genetic heritage simply doesn't allow us to give up without a fight. But that's exactly what Shute's world does, without even any show of resistance. In the entire book there are only two, or perhaps three, real outbursts of emotional reaction to what's happening. No drastic mobilization to prepare a bunker to wait out the twenty year period of radiation, no desperate attempt to continue the species at any and all cost, as in When Worlds Collide ("Waste anything but time!"); just passive acquiescence and, in the end, mass suicide. This fact--this long, drawn-out, and ultimate loss of hope, which few other works can match--is what makes the book so important. In sum, Shute asked the Cold War reader how s/he will respond to a threat that, unlike the one in On the Beach, was still only potential. Peter Holmes, in his deathbed speech, suggests education. The book's meaning and purpose is best summed up in the closing shot of the original film; the banner proclaiming to an empty Melbourne "There is still time, brother."
On a literary level the book leaves much to be desired. Particularly grating to this American is the terribly contrived American dialect of Dwight Towers, the American sub commander. But despite this, On the Beach is a classic of the genre--if you can stomach it.
Book Review: The End of the Humanity as Determined by Nevil Shute
Summary: 3 Stars
Nevil Shute started out writing this novel working backwards, knowing what ending he would have, the end if humanity (which you know if read any of the other reviews here), then decided to emphasis that by making it as mournful and utterly morose as possible, then fit the events of the story to them, so it's almost laughable to consider that this is how reality could have played out when it's Shute pulling the puppet strings on the characters to achieve his desired ending the way he wanted to achieve it.
Written during the cold war of the 50's, this novel was supposed to highlight the futility of nuclear war. So this was supposed to let those that somehow didn't understand the power of nuclear weapons, that the Soviets, and others, now have the bomb (which they obtained from American citizen spies working with nuclear secrets) and that nuclear war was un-winnable. Now highlighting the horrors of nuclear war and the hideous death toll it would incur on people, let alone the threat to the human race is commendable, but it's the general philosophy of the book that, OK, there are two or three superpowers that have nuclear weapons, making them equal in cruelty, democracy, and liberty so that's it, no point in having a nuclear weapons and that absolutely nothing justifies their use in any way whatsoever. It sidesteps the reality that one of these superpowers, the Soviets, murdered 20 million people, put countless numbers into labor camps, and was an completely oppressive totalitarian society. Put it another way, consider if the novel had the Nazi's winning WWII, that the Nazi's had nuclear weapons and were continuing the huge murders of people, sending people into labor camps, and repressing democracy, would you then have such qualms on the US having a stockpile of nuclear weapons as a deterrant? Would you then think, as the characters in this novel do, that ah well, we all did this to ourselves and thus deserve this outcome? If you answer differently they maybe you should brush up on history. Sure enough one totalitarian society is marketed as more evil by popular culture, but that doesn't change the history books documentation of the horrors by both the Soviets and the Nazi's. One questions if the author would have written the ending different if it had been a nuclear war with the Nazi's as the survivors "remarkably" fighting for humanity and for the future of mankind rather than accepting going out with a whimper.
From reading the other reviews there are two types of basic readers that would find this novel of interest: those that would use it as a political manuscript of how humanity ended (although we're still here) and those that have gone through some traumatic experience in their life. For everyone else, sure you can find something appealing in the story, but it's dated, just reading the first page of the poem by T.S. Eliot gives you the theme, and in this day and age it's just average. If you're an average working person you have a job, busy, have friends, maybe family, and have to parcel your time that you invest in reading a book. You don't have to read this. End of the world novel's are quite compelling, and there's many of them, and more to date, out there. If you want an end of the world novel written around the same time, George R. Stewart's end of the world Earth Abides was a more interesting read, and I would recommend that over this novel.