This may be called a book review by some or, more accurately, an exhortation to read On the Beach by Nevil Shute.
On the Beach is a book that seemingly sets out to mislead. I imagine you’re thinking, based on the title, of a literary style version of Baywatch. Then, if I told you that it’s about the aftermath of a nuclear war, that every character from the start knows that they will be dead within a year, you may start imagining some terribly exciting Mad Max rip-off, full of looting and civil unrest, or possibly, a book of people weeping about their misfortune.
On the Beach is neither of those. However, it is a book that has punched me in the gut in a way that no book has for years.
In 1962, a nuclear war broke out, killing everyone in the Northern hemisphere, and the radiation is slowly making its way South. The book starts in January 1963. Our protagonists, an American submarine captain, an Australian naval officer and his wife, and a young farmer’s daughter, live near Melbourne, and know that the radiation will reach them by September. The book describes how they spend their last few months, and the little ways they go mad dealing with it. Every character comes to terms with their death, or doesn’t, in their own way. A small cast means that you care for each of the characters, despite knowing that they are doomed. By the end, as each dies off one by one, it leaves a real impression. It’s a book that made me miserable, and briefly made me forget that I wasn’t going to die in a few months. As a person who finds himself too rarely seriously emotionally affected by literature, that’s a major point in the book’s favour.
In a way, On the Beach is a parody of the British stiff upper lip; one character objects to opening the Trout season early (before everyone who could fish is dead) on the grounds that it will ruin by fishing in future years. This is not surprising, Nevil Shute was a British aeronautical engineer, and emigrated to Australia a few years before he wrote the book.
So go on, read it. It’s not very long – I finished it in a day. Even if you can’t be bothered to read the book, there’s a fantastic film (the 1959 one, not the 2000 one, which is stupid). It’s the most emotionally impactful book I’ve read in years, and it gets full points for that even if the emotions that it inspires are negative ones.
“On The Beach” by cyclingshepherd is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0