Nevil Shute (1899–1960)

This is an excellent, horrific and haunting Cold War post-apocalyptic novel written in 1957 and set in the near future of 1963 in a south eastern Australia which is one of the few parts of the world free from the effects of nuclear war that has wiped out Europe, North America and Asia. At the outset of the novel, it is the Antipodean summer and the Christmas-New Year period, and only parts of South America, South Africa and the Antipodes survive, as the deadly radiation inexorably creeps show more south, with the prediction that the whole world will be wiped out by September. The characters exist in a bizarre half world, in which most people continue to go about their lives as normally as they can, even planning for the future in terms of planting crops or trees for the following year. There is little of the panic and extreme hedonistic behaviour that is often seen in post-apocalyptic novels and indeed in real life apocalyptic historical scenarios such as the Black Death. This struck me as somewhat implausible and perhaps a reflection of the mores of the time the novel was written. Nevertheless, it gave the (some what stereotypical 1950s) characters and the narrative through which they moved a certain dignified pathos that I found moving, as events crept towards the final inevitable end, with most people choosing to die through taking officially distributed suicide pills rather than letting the effects of radiation poisoning run their full course. This was an electric and gripping read, fundamentally depressing but very stark and thought provoking about the nature of human relations, loyalty and managing in a crisis. show less

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
The final lines of TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men are the epigraph for this understated, existential, apocalyptic novel. It’s situational, rather than plot or character-based. The writing is ordinary at the sentence level. Yet this made me feel more deeply than most novels do.

There has been a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere and radioactive fallout is spreading across the globe at a fairly predictable rate, as contact is show more progressively lost with places in north America, Europe, and Asia.
“The short, bewildering war had followed, the war of which no history had been written or ever would be written now.”

In Melbourne, they know what’s coming. They know roughly when (a few months). They know the symptoms of radiation sickness. They know it’s inevitable - and that suicide pills will be offered when death is imminent.

“It’s like waiting to be hung… Or maybe it’s a period of grace.”
However you would react (denial, recklessness, carrying on as normal, investigating and understanding, recording things for posterity), there’s a character with the same mindset, although they’re plausibly inconsistent.

Image: Dinghy racing and spectators on the beach. It's 1930s England, but I like the mood and image. (Source)

Often, daily life is spectacularly ordinary, idyllic even. People debate whether to open the trout season early, even though it will damage fishing for the following year.
“I couldn’t bear to - to just stop doing things and do nothing. You might as well die now and get it over.”
I thought of photos that have 9/11 in the background, while people in the foreground weren’t still, briefly, happily oblivious.

Men

“I’d like to do things right, up till the end.”
Dwight Towers captains what is almost certainly the last US submarine. He has/had a wife and two young children (he knows they’re long-dead, but often he talks of them in the present and future tenses). He takes some Australian crew to track radiation spread, search for survivors (they know there won't be any), and then to investigate a puzzling but nonsensical Morse message.
“They learned nothing, save for the inference that, when the end had come, the people had died tidily.”

Peter is an officer in the Australian navy, married to Mary (daughter of a naval officer), with a baby.
“She lived in a dream world of unreality, or else she would not admit reality.”

John Osborne is a scientist specialising in nuclear radiation. He wanted to be a racing driver and is lovingly restoring a Ferrari. The final Grand Prix, held earlier than usual, is a bloodbath, but exciting if that’s your thing.

Elderly gents at the Pastoral Club try to drink the cellar dry, while there’s still time.

Moira

Moira is a farmer’s daughter, only 24, and angry that she’ll never get to travel, marry, or have children, and bored because there’s no time to study or pursue a career.

The story seems to be about the men, but for me, Moira was the main character, and the most three-dimensional. The one who evolves the most. The one I wept for. She becomes insightful, selfless, and sensitive. The most mature of all of them.

Image: Moira watching a sub at sea, from the 1959 film

Is it too late?

Before the Cold War, I was taught to be afraid of strangers proffering sweets, getting a chill (as if we were in a Victorian novel), and quicksand (not a major risk of death anywhere). I knew my parents agreed with some UK, EU, and US newspapers and governments more than others. But back then, the assumption was that they all acted in good faith. Shute realised that was not necessarily the case.

“Newspapers… 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.”

Quotes

• “Northern hemisphere people seldom mixed well now with people of the southern hemisphere… The intolerable sympathy made a barrier.”

• “You’ve always known that you were going to die at some time. Well, now you know when.”

• “None of us really believe it’s going to happen - not to us.”

• “It’s not the end of the world at all,” he said. “It’s only the end for 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.”

See/know also

There is a pervading sense of calm acceptance that makes this very different from most other apocalyptic fiction I can think of, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (which I love and reviewed HERE).

Image: The cover of Raymond Briggs’ 1981 When the Wind Blows, the stuff of my childhood/teen nightmares.

Until a fortnight ago, I'd conflated Shute's novel with Alex Garland's The Beach, which I thought was some sort of soppy romance. However, “Wonderland: Science Fiction in the Atomic Age” on Sky Arts included this, and sent me scurrying to read it, though I confess to watching the 1959 film first. It stars Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner (too old for Moira), Fred Astaire (no dancing), and Anthony Perkins (no shower scene) and is not bad (see imdb), though of course, I preferred the book.

I thought the epigraph very apt, but in 1958, only a year after publication, Shute regretted it, telling Henry Hewes: "One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone's mind.” See Wikipedia.

The title doesn’t just refer to pleasant scenes on the beach and in yacht races, which do feature. It’s also naval slang for retirement. show less

On the Beach by Nevil Shute tells the story of the last month’s in the lives of the last people on earth, and although slightly dated, still makes chills run up and down my spine. Nuclear war has come and gone, there is no one left alive in the earth’s northern hemisphere and clouds of radiation are slowing flowing south.

From the very beginning of the book, the people know that their time is limited, the story starts on January 27th and they know that the end will come sometime by the show more end of August or early September. We follow a small assortment of people living in and around Melbourne, Australia, through these end times and see them live out their time with dignity and honor. There are times when one or another gets a little shaky, but overall I was very moved by how they handled what was coming, of course the war was a year or so in the past so they had had time to work through their feelings of disbelief and anger. Slowly the cities of the southern hemisphere are blacked out by radiation poisoning and eventually the sickness arrives and the last surviving people on earth ready themselves for the end.

In Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, the world ends with a whimper not a bang, but this was nevertheless a shocking and terrifying read. I can imagine that this book had a powerful impact when it was released in the early 1960’s during the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis and such a future seemed possible. The author’s vision of a kinder, gentler end of life struck a cord with me, but sadly, I fear that people in today’s world of terrorism, religious intolerance and partisan politics would not go with so quietly or with such nobility. show less

Six-word review: Mild-mannered homebody braves challenging journey.

Extended review:

Keith Stewart is a prosaic Frodo Baggins pulled out of his quiet everyday world to undertake a classic hero's journey, as Joseph Campbell defines it: he answers the call, he survives the ordeals, he returns with the elixir.

Keith is a plain, ordinary, home-loving man with no ego to speak of, content with a fixed, simple life, who suddenly finds himself charged with a duty that requires extraordinary measures. A show more man of meager means, he must find a way to travel from his home in England to a remote, uninhabited island in the South Pacific in order to carry out the daunting task entrusted to him by his sister.

Not so ordinary after all, though, our Keith: within the very small sphere of miniature-machine hobbyists, he is a world-renowned expert, engineer of designs for tiny working machines and author of articles about them in a weekly specialty magazine. Subscribers around the globe know and admire his work, and many have benefited from his generous-spirited correspondence. As he travels he is amazed to be greeted as a celebrity because of his stature within the engineering world. Although he is much too modest to realize it, he has earned gratitude from his readers because of his selfless courtesy and assistance to others over the years as they have sought his help through exchanges of letters. Now several of those are in a position to treat him handsomely and offer him significant aid in completing his mission.

But it is his own courage and endurance that see him through: those and his goodness of heart and simple honesty, which win him friends who can help him--just as in the old folktales where a humble hero befriends creatures he meets on his road to adventure, only to find in his own time of need that they possess special powers and are able to confer magical favors to repay his kindness.

There's no magic here, of course, other than the magic of invention and resourcefulness. Shute describes in loving detail the complex apparatus and processes involved in sailing, metal machining, and lumber milling. There's not enough pretext in either character or plot for all the technical particulars he supplies, which seems to be there for their own sake, much like ornamentation in a fabulously excessively detailed pen-and-ink drawing that you simply can't look at without awe. Somehow, though, all that obsessively intricate detail succeeds in showing a bigger picture, one in which skill is respected, expertise is valued, and dedication is rewarded. I'd guess that a story like this probably couldn't be published today; I can easily imagine a book editor insisting that all the technicality be drastically reduced in favor of more interpersonal drama.

Not that drama is lacking. A storm at sea is as chilling as any I've ever met in print, including in a Thor Heyerdahl voyage. There are touching moments as well, especially between Keith and his young niece. And there is nicely restrained humor. The centerpiece of the book is the leg of the journey taken with a modern-day Neanderthal named Jack Conelly, proprietor of a minimalist vessel that appears to be Keith's only hope for reaching Tahiti from Honolulu. Jack is a great secondary character--a natural man, somewhat appalling, but good-hearted, with the rugged, odoriferous charm of a bear in his den. Being trapped on a small boat with him on a 2700-mile journey, with no engine, no navigational devices, no radio, and no inhabited land in between, sounds more than a little intimidating; but practical-minded Keith considers his options and then takes the likeliest path to his goal, yielding no more to doubt once he's made his decision.

Written in 1960, the book reflects some attitudes that are long out of date, and in general those don't bother me. I'm not even too miffed that Shute's Americans all sound like uneducated bumpkins not long out of the boonies. But I did find myself cringing at the fact that they can scarcely speak a sentence that doesn't begin with "Say." Most of us don't talk like that and never did.

That's a small point, however. I enjoyed this book, and I especially liked the epilogue, which gives us a quick-take life trajectory for each of the principal characters. I wish more novels would provide such a satisfactory answer to the question "And then what?" show less