Customer Reviews

On the Beach

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I think most people here have already summed up this book, and there is little I can add to what they've said. I'll try anyway.

On the Beach tells the story of the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. The setting is Australia, one of the few places in the world to escape not only the bombs, put the deadly clouds of radioactive fallout from the war. But they'll only survive for a little while, because the global wind currents are slowly pushing the deadly fallout down to Antarctica. The Aussies only have a short time before they all come down with radiation sickness and die. The whole book is an emotional rollercoaster as the dreaded day of death looms ever closer, with absolutely nothing to prevent doom. Most people are resigned to their fate, and try and stay busy with various daily rituals in an effort to keep their sanity.

The two main characters of the book are Dwight Towers, a U.S. submarine commander who has survived the war and is in refuge in Australia, and Moira Davidson, a young Australian girl who is bitter about her fate and seeks consolation with Dwight. Other characters are introduced, such as a young couple with a baby and a scientist who likes racing cars. The reader is quickly drawn into these people's lives, and really comes to care about what happens to them. Needless to say, the ending isn't warm and cheery. I had to stop reading the book several times and take a little break to get rid of the huge lump in my throat. It is a VERY tough read at the end. If you don't get emotional, you just might be dead.

There are several small points to make about the book. The author, Nevil Shute, isn't exactly the best writer in terms of grammar. There are awkward sentences and errors, and it sometimes detracts from the story. He also wrote this book in the late 1950's, and he's English, so there are words that don't make much sense today. Despite these flaws, the story is still gut wrenching and compelling. I really appreciated Shute's sense of irony. Moira first meets Dwight because she is enlisted to keep his mind off of his dead family in America. However, Moira ends up being the one who starts to break down. More irony appears when people make plans that they know they won't be alive to keep. The scene when Peter and Mary are planning their garden is is a good example of this irony, and you'll groan in anguish over it. Overall, I haven't been this upset over something since I watched the film "Cutting Moments".

I'm surprised more people haven't heard of this book. I gave it to my Mom to read first, and she bawled like a baby at the end. You may not bawl, but you'll certainly be affected.

"On the Beach" is one of those books that you read for the concept and the story, but not for the quality of the writing. The plot centers around the lives of a few remaining survivors of a nuclear war who live in Australia. Since the was has taken place in the northern hemisphere, Australia has largely escaped unscathed--for the moment. But as prevailing winds approach Australia, they carry lethal doses of radiation with them. The implication of this is that all of the characters in the book--in fact everyone in the world--will inevitably be extinguished.

"On the Beach" has a profound psychological impact because it is devoid of the intense action that usually accompanies nuclear apocolypse films. The destruction has already occurred elsewhere and the citizens of Australia are largely going about their business knowing they will soon die. The fact that their infrastructure has not been destroyed and that all of their social aparatus is still intact makes their fate all the more sad and earie.

Although this book is set in the Cold War it's outcome is still relevant and feasible today. The nuclear warheads generated by the arms race haven't gone away. The former Soviet Union is a desparate, chaotic place, and as several reviewers pointed out, more small countries are joining the nuclear club. One could say that Nuclear madness has merely transformed itself, but its danger certainly hasn't disappeared.

I think everyone should read this book to be reminded of the possible future we all face.

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.

This novel gives a very possible, and frighteningly probable, view of the way things could easily end up, as small and unstable countries enter the growing club of nuclear armament. The most eery (yet unfortunately difficult to swallow) aspect of the book is the refusal by many of the supposedly intelligent characters to truly absorb the reality of the situation. Bit by bit, over the space of a couple of years, radiation is slowly drifting across the equator from the heavily bombed, destroyed, and radioactive northern continents, to invade and kill the southern half of the globe in turn. But people continue to plan for the future, and act as though that future will come.

Unfortunately, the characters are so 2-dimensional, and act such trite and ordinary roles, that they failed to come alive for me. I never could quite believe in their reactions, either. That they could so fully split their consciousness of the approaching radiation from the actions of their daily life boggled my mind, and blew my suspension of disbelief.

Sorry. Great concept, unconvincingly executed.

As radiation from a nuclear war that destroyed all life in the northern half of the earth gradually spreads southward to deliver its poison to all who live there, a number of Australians and a handful of Americans who reside among them attempt to continue some facet of normal life, even when the time for all things is nearly done. We learn going into this foreboding novel that at most one year remains to even the most fortunate of those yet alive. We read along as the last of humankind pathetically (or is it with dignity?) plant gardens, play with their children, reform from their alcoholism, fall in love, race cars...the list could go on and on. What must it be like to dwell under these horrible circumstances? What must it do, for instance, to the mind of a devout theist when she sees the deity to whom she has maintained lifelong faith is not going to arrive deus ex machina to save her and make everything right again? What must utter and complete moral hopelessness be like? How horrible must it be to be young and rise each morning knowing the despair that would come with so many hopes lying before you, now impossible to ever fulfill? And what must it be like to be a parent and understand that the children you bought into a terrible world reeling in extremis, will die in a matter of weeks?

On The Beach is not about exploding cities and geo-political confrontations. The war and the nations who fought it are distant, quiet memories, barely of significance. On The Beach is about people, and how those people carry on in the face of a doom they neither created nor can elude. It is one of the darkest works of fiction ever produced, and also one of the finest. If it impacts a jaded modern reader so startlingly, what must it have been like to read this fifty years ago when the very concept of global extinction after nuclear conflict, was new?

A universal, eternal classic of the Cold War era.

"On the Beach" was published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War. Set in the near future (the early 1960's), people in Australia are waiting with dignity for radioactive fallout to kill them. A nuclear war in the northern hemisphere has already destroyed everything there. In a few months the same will happen here.

I read "On the Beach" in 1989. That same year I had seen "The Day After" and "Testament". For some reason I had a morbid fascination with the end of the world, and what might happen after.

"On the Beach" might seem a bit dated now. The consequences of nuclear war have been speculated upon for several years. In 1983 scientists came up with the nuclear winter theory, where all the dust and fallout from the explosions would block out the sun and cause the world to freeze over. It sounds plausible enough. Once the winter was over the ozone layer would be damaged and the planet saturated with ultaviolet light from the sun. Others argue that people would survive somewhere, not everyone would die from radiation.

Whatever the case, "On the Beach" is still a powerful book. It makes you wonder how you would feel, knowing how you were going to die and when. The Australians are fortunate in that they are offered suicide pills for when the pain becomes too much. People aren't so worried about nuclear war any more. But on the news this morning I saw Boris Yeltsin remind Bill Clinton that they still have a nuclear arsenal. This was after Clinton threatened Russia with sanctions if Russian forces attacked Grozny... But we've managed to avoid nuclear war up until now, so there's probably nothing to worry about. Is there?

"On the Beach" was one of the first novels to describe what the aftermath of a nuclear war would be like, although the genre of post-apocalyptic novels goes back at least to Robert Cromie's "The Crack of Doom" in 1895. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martians used radium bullets in 1912's "A Princess of Mars" and Upton Sinclair's 1924 novel "The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000" involved atomic weapons. J.B. Priestly's "The Doomsday Men" in 1938 used radioactive material to disrupt the earth's crust. There was a nuclear war in the background of George Orwell's "1984," and the same can be said for the Ray Bradbury collection of short stories, "The Martian Chronicles."

Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" was published in 1957, which was the same year that the Soviets launched Sputnik and Nikita Khrushchev boasted of a super bomb that could melt the polar icecaps. That might explain why this became the most prominent nuclear war novel of the decade, if not for that entire generation. Shute quotes T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" on the title page with the famous lines "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper," and indeed the novel is not about surviving the war but awaiting the end of the world. Given what we now know about nuclear winter, Shute's pessimism is actually somewhat understated, but that does not make it any the less disturbing.

"On the Beach" is set in Australia, two years after the war of which all anybody knows is that it put so much radioactive fallout into the atmosphere that there are eight months left before it reaches Down Under, where humanity is making its last stand. Unlike books like "Alas, Babylon" by Pat Frank in 1959, which deal primarily with how people try to keep on living civilized lives in the wake of an all-out nuclear exchange, "On the Beach" is about facing the inevitable end. Jonestown was still a couple of decades away and the story of the mass suicides at Massada was a minor historical footnote, so when the book was published there was nothing to color the horror of a continent of human beings choosing to end their lives with pills rather than succumb to the slow death by radiation poisoning (for that matter, there was not an active cultural debate on euthanasia either). There might not be anything more unrealistic in the novel than the idea that the scientific inevitable of the coming radiation is universally accepted. Yet that is a major factor in creating the depressing nature of the novel.

The focus of the novel is on a group of characters. Scientist John Osborne provides the necessary scientific details while tuning his racing car for the world's last Grand Prix. Peter and Mary Holmes are spending their final days taking care of their baby daughter and planning a garden they will never live to see. Their friend Moira Davidson chooses to sedate herself by constantly drinking, until she meets Dwight Towers, captain of the U.S.S. Scorpion, which makes him the highest ranking officer in what is left of the U.S. Navy. The two are able to provide some comfort for each other, but Towers still heeds the call to duty. When a mysterious message is received, being transmitted from Seattle where it is assumed every one is dead, Towers takes his submarine back to see if there is still reason to hope as time runs out.

Part of the problem with this novel is that most readers come to it after seeing the powerful 1959 film made by director Stanley Kramer, with its haunting use of the song "Waltzin' Matilda" and its insistent warning that "It's Not Too Late, Brother!" Shute's characters are much less compelling on the page and the screenwriters were remarkably faithful to many of the key elements of the novel so you do not really get the sense of reading it to get more of the story. There are those who complain that what little Shute has to saw about the war and its weapons of mass destruction does not make sense, but as was the case with the television movie "The Day After" such concerns are negligible because both narratives need the war to allow them to tell their stories. Paying attention to the details definitely misses the larger picture here.

Ultimately, "On the Beach" is more important historically than it is critically. This is not great literature, but it inspired many of the post-nuclear war novels that followed, such as Peter Bryant's "Two Hours to Doom" (which later became "Dr. Strangelove"), Helen Clarkson's "The Last Day," and John Brunner's "The Brink." If you have to choose between the two, watch the movie rather than read the book. But if you are a student of this genre, then you have to read this book simply because of its impact in this field. It is for that reason that I round up on this one.

I had feared 'On the Beach' would be a overly macabre post-apocalytical (nuclear war) story since it was written back in the early years of the cold war when folks were scrambling to build their personalized bomb shelters. But in fact Nevil Shute writes a story that is compassionate and largely realistic. Despite being written fifty years ago 'On the Beach' feels very fresh and topical. And the author was clearly a fine writer. The prose and characterizations are uniformly excellent.

Now back to the story, we have a small town in southern Australia waiting for the radiation from the nuclear fallout of WW III to arrive and ultimately kill everyone (..the rest of the world has been wiped out, with only the folks in the remote southern hemisphere still unaffected). We have several families trying to get on with normal life knowing their days are numbered. These people are experiencing the width and breadth of life: parents tending to young children, people still desperating wanting love, and those who have recently lost loved ones. Yes, the ending is what you might expect. Yet amongst all the tragedy the author had his characters behaving in a dignified fashion, which is my only quibble with the book. I would have expected more chaos and panic.


Bottom line: a sobering yet slightly sugar-coated view of mankind dying off planet Earth. Strongly recommended.

I generally post my book reviews within days of finishing them, while they are freshest in my mind. However, in a strange twist of fate, I read On The Beach during the second weekend in September of 2001, and I dont need to remind anyone what happened on the following Tuesday. When I closed the book, I had chills up my spine, but at the same time I was relieved, complacently sure that the events described by Nevil Shute could never happen. After all, the Cold War ended years ago. Then, just days later, the world as I knew it was suddenly changed, and the impossible was possible once again. During those first few surreal days after September 11th, I found my thoughts returning to this book time and time again as I stared at the horrifying images on my TV screen and listened to the chilling speculation about what would happen next. But each time, I consciously pushed it out of my mind, because it was suddenly hitting a little too close to home.

Even before the specter of nuclear war became a more tangible threat, this was a frightening book because its so realistic (despite the scientific inaccuracies  keep in mind, this was written half a century ago). Other reviewers have complained that theres not enough action, but think about it  if you knew you were going to die in a few months and there was nothing you could to do to prevent it, what would you do? I think most of us would find ourselves spending our final days more in the manner of Shutes characters than like anyone in a Bruce Willis film. Wed be the young married couple, tending our prized garden and cherishing our baby daughter. Wed be the lonely naval commander, dreaming of the wife and children we lost. Wed be the party girl, cramming in all the good times we could. In other words, wed be doing what we knew for as long as we could, until we were forced to face the unknown. Maybe wed try something wed always dreamed about, like the Grand Prix, if the opportunity came along. Maybe, like Moira, wed grow a little, and salvage something out of what remained of our life. But there wouldnt be any Hollywood style heroics to save the universe. If youre looking for a Die Hard type action adventure story, this is not the book for you. If you want a subtle, thought provoking psychological drama, it is.

The beach, when one beholds it as such, is the end of the world.

Nevil Shute's incredible novel is not about surviving a global nuclear holocaust. The reader will follow the lives of several people, some of whom are related, some who are friends, and some who have been brought to Australia by inevitability. One of these strangers, Dwight Towers, is an American commander for the U.S. Navy who oversees a vital submarine mission to the United States' western shores. And there the servicemen will observe, on the beach, the unsettling lack of human life.

When not commissioned, Lieutenant Commander Peter Holmes lives with his brand new family, Mary and his young baby Jennifer. There they spend their days living in labored bliss, on the beach, and frequently visited by family friend Moira Davidson, a young blonde in her 20s whose hobby was once gin, but is now brandy. She consumes more liquor than even Alistair MacLean can wave an empty glass at. Though her disposition is one of genuineness, she begins enticing the submarine captain Dwight into falling in love with her. By the end of the tale, Moira becomes the most beautiful and haunted character and her faithfulness and loyalty brought me to tears more so than any other character.

Shute's novel frightened me. We are, all of us, led to believe that much of Fate is in our own hands. Every day we make decisions that affect the rest of our lives, and this we do not need to be reminded of. What we forget, however, is how fragile and ephemeral our lives are, and at any given moment, our lives are not necessarily in the hands of God, but very possibly in the hands of other human beings. It is worthwhile to remember, lest we forget, that all humans err.

It is only at the very end of the book that some of the characters, who have been living a life restrained, must finally accept the truth. Peter states, "[I]f a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there's not much that you or I can do about it" (229). The small matter of pride is what tears marriages and friendships apart. Unfortunately, it can also destroy the world.

It is so subtle, it is easy to overlook, but Shute's motif with beaches pervades the story and ultimately becomes the one thing that never changes.

I read the 1963 Signet edition. My dictionary dash consisted of "sedulously" (31).