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| Cover: Vintage International PB (Feb. 2010) |
| ON THE BEACH Nevil Shute New York: Bantam, circa 1972 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-307-47399-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-307-47399-6 | 276p. | SC | 95¢ | |
Nevil Shute was a prolific author — a fact that I suspect is unknown to many today, as it was to me. He's famous for On the Beach, the novel of nuclear apocalypse that was made into a fine movie starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. Those of us who are engineers probably also know of his partial autobiography, Slide Rule. But how many can name two or more other novels by him?
In fact, his output (listed on the page linked below) runs to 24 novels, a partial autobiography, and a flight log. Seven of the novels have been turned into feature films and/or TV presentations. On the Beach has been reprinted so often that there are at least 17 different covers for it.1 It was filmed in 1959, made into a TV movie in 2000, and a full-cast audio dramatization was broadcast on BBC 4 in November 2008.
However, I must say that I did not entirely enjoy the novel. Its main claim to fame seems to be its unique approach to global thermonuclear war. Instead of portraying the desparate fight by citizens of the contending nations, Shute shows us the reaction of Australians, who were not involved in the conflict. True, some Americans appear in the story — the crew of a nuclear submarine (though not a "boomer") that happens to be in the Pacific. But when the home country stops responding to their hails, they cruise to Melbourne and place themselves under Australian command. Thereafter, for some six months, everyone behaves with perfectly civilized resignation while they wait for the slow tide of radiation from the northern hemisphere to reach and kill them.3
I would hope that, given six months and the resources of a whole country, untouched as yet by the war, Australia's military would have tried to construct some underground shelters in which a few people could survive until surface conditions were livable again — or at least discussed the possibility before deciding they couldn't make it a success. Anguished grumbling is as close to this as Shute's characters get. Like this:
The question of survival is not moot. First, Shute's premise is extreme: No matter how many bombs were detonated,2 it's unlikely that radiation would kill everyone in the northern hemisphere as quickly as he projects. But even granting that, any group of people as yet untouched by that radiation, given a grace period of months, should include some who opt to struggle for survival. That it might turn out to be a futile endeavor changes nothing.
"The scientist said, 'The trouble is, the damn things got too cheap. The original uranium bomb only cost about fifty thousand quid towards the end. Every little pipsqueak country like Albania could have a stockpile of them, and every little country that had that, thought it could defeat the major countries in a surprise attack. That was the real trouble.'" – Page 77 |
Or like this:
"I suppose I haven't got any imagination," said Peter thoughtfully. "It's—it's the end of the world. I've never had to imagine anything like that before." John Osborne laughed. "It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us." Dwight Towers raised his head. "I suppose that's right. There didn't seem to be much wrong with Cairns, or Port Moresby either." He paused, thinking of the flowering trees that he had seen on shore through the periscope, cascaras and flame trees, the palms standing in the sunlight. "Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this." The scientist said, "That's absolutely and precisely right." – Pages 79-80 |
Or, close to the final tromp:
"Couldn't anyone have stopped it?" "I don't know. . . . Some kinds of silliness you just can't stop," he said. "I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there's not much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness." "But how could you have done that, Peter? I mean, they'd all left school." "Newspapers," he said. "You could have done something with newspapers. We didn't do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no government was wise enough to stop us having them that way." – Page 268 |
Trained as an engineer, Shute certainly would have been able to envision technical means of constructing shelters. He might have made an assessment that there simply was no way to construct them tight enough or stock them fully enough, in the time allowed, to keep people alive for the necessary twenty years. That assessment might even be correct for the conditions he imagined. Even so, he served in the Admiralty during World War 2, so he lived through the London blitz. That, and the nature of the other novels he wrote, make it impossible for me to understand the attitude of this one. I can only surmise that his heart attacks brought about a sense of personal resignation which leaked over into his writing. I knocked his novel's rating down a notch for this. More's the pity. Depressing it might be,4 but On the Beach is well written and well worth reading.
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