On The Beach was published at a time when the increasing tension between the United States and the Soviet Union made nuclear war seem a distinct possibility. So real was the fear that the US began drawing up civil defence plans to prepare civilians for a military attack and deployed bombers near Soviet borders.
Neville Shute imagined a scenario where the worst fears have happened. A nuclear war has wiped out entire populations in the Northern Hemisphere and covered the region in a deadly radioactive cloud. The cloud is slowly but steadily drifting southward.
Shute’s novel focuses on a group of people in Melbourne, Australia who have perhaps six months left — a year at most — before they too will be engulfed in the cloud. Nobody really knows how it started—” people weren’t quite sure who fired the first missile” but that’s largely irrelevant now. All that matters now is how they are to get through the next few months.
It’s a chilling scenario. What makes On the Beach particularly powerful is that his characters are not heroes embarking on a last ditch effort to save the world. Despite the faint intermittent signal picked up from somewhere in North America, these people know deep down that there is no escape from their fate. So the novel becomes an exploration of how humans respond to the certainty of extinction and how they choose to spend the little time they have left.
Facing the Inevitable: Different Responses
Each of Shute’s principal characters represents a different way of coping with doom.
In the face of the unknown, some cling to what is familiar and certain. American submarine commander Dwight Towers for example, holds fast to the routine and discipline of his vessel even though there’s no military structure left to serve. Peter and Mary Holmes represent a different kind of normalcy. They make plans for their home, planting bulbs they will not see blossom.
Others find a new purpose in their lives.
The scientist John Osborne gives full rein to his love of racing cars as a distraction from what’s to come. He’s determined to race in the Australian Grand Prix—a final Grand Prix, naturally—and die doing what he loves. “Everyone’s got to die one day. Some sooner, some later. You’ve got to have some fun before you do it,” he reasons.
Party girl Moira Davidson undergoes the most significant transformation in the novel. She stops drinking and hanging out in bars and learns shorthand as the first step towards her first real job. Does all this self-improvement matter when there is no future in which to reap the rewards? Her answer is an emphatic yes.
“You know,” he said, “now that I’ve got used to the idea, I think I’d rather have it this way. We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I kind of like that. I kind of like the thought that I’ll be fit and well up till the end of August and then – home. I’d rather have it that way than go on as a sick man from when I’m seventy to when I’m ninety.”
Are they in denial about the inevitability? Yes to some extent. Dwight Towers for instance keeps up a pretence that his wife and children back in the States might still be alive. He knows this is futile but as he explains to Moira, “I couldn’t ever get around to believing that they were dead” so he goes shopping for Christmas presents for them.
Ordinary Life Continues
What I found especially unnerving about this book was how calmly these people behave. It’s all rather civilised. Life doesn’t descend into chaos — shops are not looted for essential supplies, gangs are not roaming the neighbourhoods or fights breaking out on street corners.
The people of Melbourne just seem to accept what’s coming and keep doing what they would in normal circumstances. They go to work, they go on fishing trips, they throw parties. When shops begin closing down because there are no new supplies coming in, the inhabitants shrug their shoulders and carry on. As one character notes, “We’ve all got to go sometime, and we’re going to go soon. Why make it worse?” He has a point but I still can’ t imagine that level of stoicism prevailing in the UK if we learned tomorrow that a radioactive cloud was heading our way.
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