On the Beach

Rating:
Summary: Great Book...VERY Depressing
Review: A great, simple book very well written and poignant. What's interesting about it is that as we enter the story, the nuclear war that will eventually doom the characters in the story has already occurred and is over. They are simply awaiting the lethal radioactive cloud to move down to the southern hemisphere and begin to kill everyone off. The people carry on their daily lives as if nothing has happened. But we see in several key scenes early in the book how painfully, heartbreakingly aware they really are. And that's the key power to the story. These people know they're doomed but what choice do they have except to continue on with their lives. The most painful scene I found in the book was how the young couple with the baby begin to plan out their garden for the next year knowing full well that they are not going to be around to see it. They're fooling themselves, obviously, but how else to cope with the inevitable.

In the end, the book has the same effect as a movie called "Testament" with Jane Alexander. You'll be depressed and feeling a little scared and hopeless.

This is not light reading.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book--Nevil Shute's most famous if not his best
Review: After a nuclear war, radiation slowly drifts southwards, gradually killing off humanity there as it has already been killed off in the Northern Hemisphere. The end is less than a year away, yet Australians, and a few American naval refugees seek to maintain their daily lives in the face of doom, and even send an exploratory submarine northwards.

The fascination of the book is watching how people react to the inevitable doom. Many just go on plegmatically, a few pretend it will never happen. Most interesting is Moira Dawson, an Australian girl who had dreamed of visiting London and Paris, and now never will, and who seeks to live what little life is left to the fullest. She learns a lesson from a stillborn romance with Dwight Towers, the submarine commander who acts as if his wife and children are alive in Connecticut.

Perhaps the limitation of this book is that most of the characters simply accept their doom, presumably having come to terms with it before the start of the book. But more of a range of viewpoints might be welcome. Could you imagine the anger and frustration of teenagers under these circumstances, in the throes of adolescence without the promise of adulthood, knowing they will never have their independence.

As in most of Shute's later works, there are no villians. That is welcome when so many books have paper villains for us to vicariously hate.

Rating:
Summary: More compulsory reading for politicians
Review: On the Beach is a book about good people caught in an impossible situation. Set in Australia, it tells the story of a diverse group of characters who are waiting to die. The whole Northern hemisphere has been obliterated by nuclear war and the clouds of fallout are drifting slowly southward. While they wait, their characters are gradually revealed, like a painting appearing as years of accumulated grime are carefully wiped away. When this book was written it had an enormous impact. People really believed that a nuclear holocaust was likely, if not inevitable, in their lifetimes. For some years, the threat receded but the events of September 11th 2001 have brought those fears back. The weapons are still in their silos, the submarines are still on their stations. We can but hope that sanity will one day prevail. In any case, this book should be read for its poignancy, its beautiful yet simple plot and its optimism in the face of tragedy.

Rating:
Summary: Great concept, somewhat listless writing
Review: On The Beach, as others have said, suffers a bit as a product of its era, not so much for the cold war stuff (which I still find chilling) but for the stilted and polite portrayal of its characters, as starched and straightforward as 50's Hollywood. It also seemed not quite believable that an entire community of people would face demise with the same orderly sense of denial and detachment; I am positive that there would be more chaos than dignity under such circumstances. None of this detracts from the building hopelessness toward the inevitable conclusion, which does benefit from the straightforward writing style. It arrives all too soon just as it would, and I found that part of the book at least to be terribly real and sad, and it stayed in my mind long after I finished. A favorite apocalyptic novel that this made me want to read again (and that I don't see mentioned in some of the top lists here) is This Is The Way The World Ends by James Morrow. This book made me cry.

Rating:
Summary: On the Beach: Style As Metaphor
Review: Stories that deal with the the end of the world often suggest that end through the style of the author. Those who have read ON THE BEACH often complain of the deadening weight of a style that is long on sensory description but short on memorable character interaction. Yet, that is precisely the point that author Nevil Shute wants to make of his apocalyptic view of worldwide nuclear death. By the time the book begins, the plot mechanism has already been set. A nuclear war has broken out, with most of the world's major centers of population put to the torch. The reader does not see this; in fact he hears about it only second hand. The stark impression that Shute draws comes mostly from dialogue with surviving Australians, who have as yet been untouched by the clouds of killing radiation that have swept the rest of the world. Unlike other post-war dramas, this one shows the aftermath, survivors who decide when and how to react in their respective ways. The primary focus is on American submarine commander Dwight Towers, who has successfully landed his sub in an Australian port. He strikes up a relation with a local woman, Moira Davidson, and they are well aware that the nuclear clock is ticking on their lives. The immunity that Australia has had is but temporary. The radiation that has spread worldwide is now slowly infiltrating their air. The dramatic center of the book is not so much human-based, but idea-based. Dwight and Moira, and other couples in the book, carry on as best they can, but the only real choice left to all of them is when to end their lives via suicide pills before the poison cloud does that for them. It is noteworthy what they do before they take the death pills. Most simply do what they have always done, the normal mundane things that marked so much of their pre-war lives. A few do dangerous things like driving in races that produce fatalities for most of the drivers. The unspoken point that Shute makes and many readers miss is the connection between what he says and how he says it. The end of the world and all life is truly a desensitizing concept. Shute's style of excessive detail and lack of human interaction suggest the feelings of the major characters. Dwight, Moira. and the others are both physically and psychologically disconnected from one another. By the end of the novel, they are dead or dying. The gap between a still surviving Dwight and Moira is emphasized by his decision to spend his last day on earth sinking his sub with all hands aboard rather than spend that last day together. ON THE BEACH is truly a depressing novel that shows the physical interactions between the dead and dying as less important than their psychic distancing. Sometimes, the expression of fear and gloom are better understood by focusing on how the characters feel rather than on what they do. No one ever said that a writing style must be perky.