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So I've just finished reading Nevil Shute's On the Beach, and let me tell you it's one gloomy and mournful book. I watched Threads (1984) about a month back on a whim, and it both destroyed and captivated me; I was left never wanting to see the film again and wanting to immediately re-watch clips, largely because few pieces of media ever feel so real and immersive. The premise of a Nuclear War and its ramifications is so genuinely terrifying because it could (relatively easily) happen tomorrow, the devices capable of turning the entire world into a hellscape like Threads are sitting in silos as I write this and thousands of engineers are sitting there monitoring for signs of an escalation that would warrant using them. It was whilst browsing reviews for Threads on Reddit that I came across a user comparing it to On the Beach, and after briefly searching up the plot I went out and bought it the next day. Spoilers ahead for the whole book.
In stark contrast to Threads, On the Beach paints a picture of a rather quaint and safe apocalypse. Written in 1957 by Nevil Shute, the book is set in Melbourne, Australia during the summer of 1962 and winter of '63 (those bloody aussies and their backwards seasons), following an intense thermonuclear exchange between the superpowers of the Northern Hemisphere the previous year. Whilst Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and the vast majority of the Southern Hemisphere completely avoided being hit by any weapons during the war, the radioactive fallout is slowly spreading southwards thanks to equatorial winds. Within the first chapter of the book we are told that the radioactive fallout is so intense due to the usage of Cobalt bombs that the entire world will be dead within a year, including the population of Melbourne once the winds reach it - this is a fact, and there is no stopping it. The novel follows the lives of a handful of different characters who, in their own ways, must slowly come to terms with their impending deaths.
In this way, On the Beach is starkly different to most other apocalyptic media. Shute (A British aeronautical engineer turned novelist) paints a picture of a society functioning very well in its isolated bubble; the weather remains beautiful, electricity and water are still running, and even the army and police continue to operate as before. Australia retains its dignity and avoids falling into anarchy, yet the presence of the ever-approaching fallout remains a seldom-talked-about anxiety for the population. We see characters create their own coping mechanisms to deal with the inevitability of death throughout the book. Dwight, a US submarine captain, maintains a strict navy discipline and stays loyal to his wife and children back home in America (whom he and everybody else is well aware are dead). Moira, a young woman who never got to live her dreams, keeps herself sane with brandy and cigarettes. Peter, an Australian naval officer, takes care of his garden and newborn baby along with his wife, despite them being well aware they will be dead before they ever see either grow. A strong underlying theme present throughout the novel is the acceptance of the inevitability of death, and the methods by which people keep their composure. You can pretend, assert that it won't happen - you can cry and scream and say it isn't fair - or you can forget about it and try to make the most of the present. Whichever way, it will still happen.
The book itself rather cleverly lulls the reader into a very similar feeling. We are aware from the very onset that the radioactive fallout will reach Melbourne very soon, that it cannot be stopped or avoided, and that it will definitely kill everybody. Yet the reader is given a persistent hope that something might change, that somehow the characters will find a way to survive. A focal point of the novel occurs when a faint radio transmission is received from Seattle, Washington, and the crew of the last surviving US Navy submarine is sent to investigate - long before the mission begins, scientists are adamant that absolute nothing could be alive in North America, that the radiation is so intense that not even those in a sealed bunker could survive. Yet for the entire journey, the reader anticipates that somehow there must be an incredible explanation for this signal, and that some person or people must be behind it. It is later revealed upon manned exploration that the signal is merely a result of a backup generator running a random sequence of beeps, and that indeed, every single living thing is dead in the US. And at the very end of the book, of course, every character dies by their own hand, taking suicide pills to avoid the horrific pain of radiation sickness. To quote TS Eliot's poem The Hollow Men, from which this book gets its title;
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
Shute does an incredible job of laying out the plot in a very calculated and systematic way (owing to his training as an engineer), whilst developing relationships between the characters that feel very deep and genuine throughout. This novel is a harsh and melancholic commentary on the pain and viciousness of Nuclear War, abut also on the fragility of life and the omnipresence of death. There's much more I could talk about but I wanted to keep this short. 5/5, I would highly recommend.
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