On the Beach (novel)
 1st edition cover | |
| Author | Nevil Shute |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Post-apocalyptic novel |
| Publisher | Ballantine Books |
Publication date | 1957 |
| Publication place | Australia |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 312 pp |
| ISBN | First edition published prior to adoption of ISBN standard Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
On the Beach is a post-apocalyptic end-of-the-world novel written by British-Australian author Nevil Shute after he had emigrated to Australia. It was published in 1957.
The novel was adapted for the screenplay of a 1959 film featuring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire, and a 2000 television film starring Armand Assante and Rachel Ward. BBC Radio 4 broadcast a full cast audio dramatisation in two hour-long episodes as part of their Classic Serial strand in November 2008.[1]
Plot summary
The story is set in what was then the near future (1963, approximately a year following World War III). The conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and killing all animal life. While the nuclear bombs were confined to the northern hemisphere, global air currents are slowly carrying the fallout to the southern hemisphere. The only part of the planet still habitable is the far south of the globe, specifically Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the southern parts of South America, although all of these areas are slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning as the fallout continues to circulate southwards.
From Australia, survivors detect a mysterious and incomprehensible Morse code radio signal originating from the United States. With hope that some life has remained in the contaminated regions, one of the last American nuclear submarines, USS Scorpion, placed by its captain under Australian naval command, is ordered to sail north from its port of refuge in Melbourne (Australia's southernmost major mainland city) to try to contact whoever is sending the signal. In preparation for this long journey the submarine first makes a shorter trip to some port cities in northern Australia including Cairns, Queensland and Darwin, Northern Territory, finding no survivors. The American captain, Dwight Towers, leads the operation, leaving behind a woman of recent acquaintance, the alcoholic Moira Davidson, to whom he has become attached, despite his feelings of guilt regarding the certain deaths of his wife and children in the U.S. He refuses to admit that they are dead and continues to behave as though they are still alive, buying them gifts and imagining his children growing older.
The Australian government makes arrangements to provide its citizens with free suicide pills and injections, so that they will be able to avoid prolonged suffering from radiation sickness. One of the novel's poignant dilemmas is that of Australian naval officer Peter Holmes, who has a baby daughter and a naive and childish wife, Mary, who is in denial about the impending disaster. Because he has been assigned to travel north with the Americans, Peter must try to explain to Mary how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with the pill should he not return from his mission.
The submarine travels to an abandoned naval installation in Seattle, where a crewman sent onto land with oxygen tanks and protective gear discovers that, although the city's residents have long since perished in the fallout, some of the region's hydroelectric power is still on-line, owing to the primitive automation technology available at that time. The mysterious signal is the result of a broken window sash teetering in the breeze and occasionally hitting a telegraph key. The expedition members then sail to the Gulf of Alaska in the northern Pacific Ocean, where they determine that radiation levels are not decreasing. Doing so discredits the "Jorgensen Effect," a scientific theory which posited that radiation levels would gradually decrease due to weather effects and might allow for human life to continue in southern Australia or at least in Antarctica. After a brief stop at Pearl Harbor (Hawaii), (most of) the submariners return to Australia to live out the little time that remains before lethal levels of radioactive contamination arrive and kill the remaining Southern Hemisphere survivors. One crew member, who is from one of the coastal areas the expedition visits, jumps ship to spend his last days in his hometown.
The characters make their best efforts to "enjoy" what time and pleasures remain to them before dying from radiation poisoning, speaking of small pleasures and continuing their customary activities. The Holmeses plant a garden that they will never see; Moira takes classes in typing and shorthand; scientist John Osborne and others organize a dangerous motor race that results in the violent deaths of several participants; and elderly members of a "gentlemen's club" drink up the wine in the club's cellar and fret about moving the fishing season up and whether agriculturally destructive rabbits are going to survive human beings. In the end, Captain Towers chooses not to remain with Moira but rather to lead his crew on a final mission to scuttle their submarine beyond the twelve-mile (20 km) limit, so that she will not rattle about, unsecured, in a foreign port. He refuses to allow his coming demise to turn him aside from his duty to the U.S. Navy and acts as a pillar of strength to his crew.
Moira watches the departure of the submarine from an adjacent hilltop as she takes her suicide pill, imagining herself together with Dwight as they die. The Holmeses get sick together, and take their pills simultaneously, so they can die as a family.
Typically for a Shute novel, the characters avoid the expression of intense emotions and do not mope or indulge in self-pity. They do not, for the most part, flee southward as refugees but rather accept their fate once the lethal radiation levels reach the latitudes at which they live. Finally, most of the Australians do opt for the government-promoted alternative of suicide when the symptoms of radiation-sickness appear.
The war is said to have involved the bombing of the United Kingdom and the United States by Egypt. The aircraft used were obtained from the USSR and so the attack was mistakenly thought to have been led by the Soviets, leading to a retaliation on the USSR by the NATO powers. The book also hints at a strike by the People's Republic of China against the USSR, aiming at occupying Soviet industrial areas near the Chinese border; this strike leads to a Russian retaliatory strike.
References
External links
- Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War In Fiction Paul Brians, Washington State University. Contains extensive discussion of Shute's book.