On the Beach

Rating:
Summary: A must-read book
Review: This book, written in 1957, has not lost any of its shocking power.

It tells the tale of a diverse, doomed group of people in Australia, after a nuclear war leaves them in the only safe place in the world. They know they are to die soon, and how each person copes with the situation is the core of the story.

How mankind got to this place in history is also explored, and the quote from T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (used on the title page) is right on the mark:

"In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river..."

"This is the way the world ends--
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

Powerful stuff. A must-read book.

Rating:
Summary: What could have been...
Review: This is an interesting book, but for some reason, I find it hard to classify, and can't quite pin down why. Please bear with me.

When reading this book, keep in mind that it was written almost 50 years ago. Social attitudes change over time, even during brief periods. For this reason, some people may find the character's behaviour odd.

The book was also written shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. The tensions which led to the crisis were already in development, and the Cuban missile crisis was the boiling point for those tensions.

The author takes those tensions into a world where diplomacy failed. I don't want to re-hash what many other reviewers have already discussed, but the novel is set in Australia about a year after "the war". Most of the details about the war are sketchy at best, altho the characters do have a general idea of what occured. What does occur is that a few of the characters are suffering from terrible rage against the powers which waged the war, in which they had no part, but for which all of humanity suffers.

The novel details the final months of a group of people who are simply waiting for time to run out. Some have commented on the inanity of carrying on with daily life, especially since life (as they know it) will simply cease within a year. I don't think that is too far fetched. Even recent events show that in times of disaster, many people realize that the best thing to do is try to carry on as best as they could.

Commerce and goverment are still operating, but as the novel winds to the sad end, so do these institutions, as well as all the rest...

It's a sad interpetation of what could have happened. I also think it's a valid book to read, even long after the end of the Cold War. For me, those most haunting images are those of a submarine slowly sailing past cities which survived the blast, but which eventually fell to radiation poisioning.

Rating:
Summary: A Haunting Idea poorly executed
Review: This novel was a big disappointment to me. I had expected something rather better written, however the characters are cardboard, the dialogue is wooden, and it reminded me of a shooting script for a TV soap. The redeeming feature is not the plot line (which I thought was absurd) but the background scenario, the condition precedent for the story.

**SOME SPOILERS** The background is that a nuclear war has taken place, and has engulfed the entire northern hemisphere. Everyone there is dead. The southern hemisphere survivors await the clouds of radioactive and toxic fallout to arrive and kill them too. I find this an intriguing idea.

But that is as far as it goes. We are supposed to believe that, in the small Australian town described, people remained well-behaved and civilised, there was no looting rape or assault, people still showed up to work, and property continues to change hands in exchange for money. Well, something tells me it wouldn't be like that. Also, the dialogue is so corny that the characters are never clearly drawn. Overall, it's a thumbs-down from me.