Printing has also stopped, meaning there will never be any documentation for the history books that this war ever happened. Due to a shortage of petroleum, the characters have to get around in horse-drawn buggies and bicycles. Shute wastes no time in giving some exposition about the war and its affects. Once I fell into the quiet rhythm of the novel, I began to appreciate its power of showing how regular people react to the fact that they will die in just a few months. At first, I was perplexed with how much of the book’s attention is centered on everyday affairs. This novel opens with a young couple and their newborn baby waking to start their day. While my only other experience reading Nevil Shute is his 1939 novel Ordeal, I couldn’t help notice a similar domestic aesthetic in this much later work. Eliot poem that includes the lines, “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” On the Beach will undoubtedly be the quietest post-apocalypse novel you will ever read. The title of this novel is based on a T.S. “The short, bewildering war had followed, the war of which no history had been written or ever would be written now, that had flared all around the northern hemisphere and had died away with the last seismic record of explosion on the thirty-seventh day.”
While the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere are still habitable, air currents are slowly bringing the radiation fallout which will mean the end of all life on the planet. The novel is set around Melbourne, Australia in 1963, after World War III decimated all life in the Northern Hemisphere. Upon its publication in 1957, I cannot imagine the amount of fear On the Beach instilled at a time when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was reaching its boiling point. If half the world was destroyed in a nuclear war and a massive amount of radioactive dust was headed your way, how would you choose to spend your final months? This is the question at the heart of On the Beach, one of several post-apocalyptic novels that were written in the wake of the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute, Photo Credit: Natalie Getter
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