Week/Book 13 – On the Beach: Review

*Note: I’m going to start with my initial impressions of the book and then move into my overall review. Following that, for anyone brave enough to stick around, I’ll go into a little more detail reviewing writing style, characters, etc.

Initial Impressions

I liked this book. It was easy to read, easy to follow, interesting without being too complicated. Some things it wasn’t:

• Fast paced
• Detailed
• Complex (different, to me at least, than complicated!)
• Intense
• Gripping

None of the above are essential to a good book, but they are kind of expected in a post apocalyptic end of the world everyone is about to die kind of book. Or is that just me? That said, I did enjoy it. It just didn’t correspond at all to what my usual idea of a dystopian novel would be. For that reason alone, I recommend it. Maybe it’s the age of the book, the difference in writing styles of the time, or even just lifestyles of the time, but for me it was a compleltely new take on something that is just about overdone these days (not that that will stop me from reading countless dystopian novels…).

Overall Review

On the Beach was kind of weird. Without giving away too much, the book centers around a group of people in southern Australia, who are awaiting the end of the world. A 39 day nuclear war was fought in the Northern hemisphere a year ago, and they’re sitting patiently waiting for the cloud of death inching ever closer to them. And when I say sitting patiently, I mean just that. There isn’t any of the looting, raping, pillaging, mass suicide, or religious fanaticism that one would normally associate with the end of the world. Instead, people are going about their day to day lives. There are noticeable differences, of course:

• Nobody has cars, as all the fuel comes from the Northern hemisphere
• A lot of people are out of work

Ok, very few noticeable differences. There may be others I’m missing as a result of having little knowledge of Australian life in the early 1960s, but essentially life is continuing as it ever was, albeit with a great deal more references to ‘it’ happening in several months time (‘it’, of course, being the end of the world). It’s noted that:

The overall effect was one of boisterous and uninhibited lightheartedness, more in the style of 1890 than of 1963.

While the lightheartedness seems rather out of place for the end of the world, it certainly does seem like a pleasant end of the world, so there’s that!

When discussing the wait for death, one character, Moira, says ‘it’s like waiting to be hung’. In response, Dwight says:

Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a period of grace.

I think that must have been Shute’s reasoning for everyone being so calm waiting for the end of the world, and while I don’t necessarily buy it, I do kind of like it. It has a sort of peace to it.

Writing

Shute’s writing is very plain and straightforward. It reminds me a little of Hemingway, in that everything is laid out with minimal fuss and straight to the point. On some level it leaves little room for interpretation; everything is provided as fact, and you take it and move on. On the other hand, the impartiality of the narrator allows you to wonder what isn’t being said and fill in the blanks with your own thoughts and details. It makes everything seems lighter, easier to read, which is great, but.. it certainly doesn’t make me want to re-read the book. For that, I need details, and lots of them!

Characters

I’m not really sure how to approach a character review of this novel, because none of the characters were especially well developed. Nonetheless, we have:

Peter Holmes

• A Navy man who has been out of work for quite a while.He’s still getting paid though. But he really wants to go back to work. Even though the world is ending.
• He, on more than one occasion, pretends he has to work (ocne he has a job again, so it’s not as much of a lie, I guess?), so that he can get away from his wife who is annoying him with her concerns about the end of life, and his infant daughter who cries a lot. Charming.
• Despite the above, Peter is pretty normal.

Mary Holmes

• Sigh. Mary drove me crazy the entire book. Seriously, 97% of the things she said or did made me want to slap her.
• Throughout the entire book, literally until pure evil was coming out of both ends of their bodies, Mary kept asking Peter ‘Is it really going to happen?. Yes Mary. This is not just a big communal flu that’ll wipe out the whole world except Southern Australia. I get that she was in denial, but… come on Mary!

Dwight Towers

• Dwight is an American submarine captain who was underwater during the war and unable to go home by the time it ended. His story is pretty sad, as he knows his whole family/life back home is gone, but he keeps going. Like Peter, Dwight loves his job.
• Dwight is also a stick in the mud who refuses to drink on his sub, while it is docked (is that the right word?), when the world is ending, because the (no longer existent) American Navy says he can’t. Wouldn’t want to break the rules, would we Dwight?
• He is also devoted to the memory of his family, going so far as to buy them presents for when he sees them in the fall. Sweet? Creepy? I’m going with a bit of both.

John Osborne

• John is a young, smart, fancy scientist guy who uses the world’s impending doom to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a racecar driver. I know, I know, I said there were no cars. Turns out as ‘it’ gets closer people are digging out their hidden supplies of fuel to go joy riding. Plus, John’s car runs on a special, different kind of fuel, that he can steal from the submarine. Convenient, no?

Moira Davidson

• I found Moira to most closely align with my idea of a character in an end of the world situation, for the first half of the book at least.
• Moira accepts that the world is ending, and uses it as an opportunity to get really drunk, all the time, and sleep around. I think. It’s more implied than explicitly stated. The sleeping around, I mean. The drinking is quite explicitly stated, repeatedly.
• Then the fine, upstanding Dwight gets his fine, upstanding claws into her brain, and she stops drinking and enrolls in a typing class, to prepare for the end of the world.

John’s mum’s puppy (spoiler alert!)

• Doesn’t really need to be on the list, but affected me more than the others.
• We learn that animals take longer to become sick than humans, from the radiation, and John’s mum is very worried about her puppy and what will happen to him after she dies.
• John does the noble thing and puts the puppy to rest when she goes, and lays him with her. It made me like John.
• I was more concerned about the fate of all the poor animals after learning they’d all be left to fend for themselves. Should we end up facing an end of the world of our own, I’m totally going to follow John’s lead.

Plot (Spoilers!)

While I found the Australia specific waiting to die part of the book somewhat questionable, the events leading up to it are scary and entirely plausible. I say this from an overall perspective, as I have nowhere near enough knowledge to comment on it from a political or scientific standpoint.

It was all a little confusing, so I won’t recount the details here, but essentially Russia and China each secretly thought they could drop a sneaky bomb in a strategic part of the other country, patiently wait for the radiation to die down, and then take over and expand into that land. One of them followed through, the USA got involved, and next thing you know we’re in Australia waiting to die.

It appears that all the big shots ended up being taken out first (i.e. presidents, army leaders, etc.). Note that I’m using laymen’s terms, totally to help you out, not at all because I don’t know the real names of things, I swear. Once all the people in power were gone, it was left to the minions to handle things.

It must have been a difficult situation… I mean, what could the guy do? He had a war upon his hands and plenty of weapons left to fight it with. I’d say it was the same in all the countries, after the statesmen got killed. It makes a war very difficult to stop.

Dwight explains above how things got out of control (as if they weren’t already), once the heads of state were no longer around to negotiate and mitigate and whatnot. He also considers the mindset of the people left in charge:

I don’t know what I’d have done in their shoes. I’m glad I wasn’t… With an enemy knocking hell out of the United States and killing all our people? When I still had weapons in my hands? Just stop fighting and give in? I’d like to think that I was so high minded but – well, I don’t know… I was never trained for diplomacy… If that situation had devolved on me, I wouldn’t have known how to handle it.

I found that to be a very interesting perspective, that it was a matter of both pride and accessibility. Also a terrifying one, as there is no shortage of either these days, and a great deal more hostility over religion than territory these days.

This is less related to the plot, but stuck with me nonetheless:

China had three times the population of Russia, all desperately overcrowded in their country.

I haven’t done any research on it, but I can’t help but think that China has survived this long with far more than 3x the population of Russia and no need to use nuclear weapons to expand their territory. Not that they haven’t had problems or had to take measures to slow population growth, but I do find myself thankful they’ve managed without resorting to such extreme measures. I wonder what Shute would think of the overcrowding today? I imagine he’d have to reconsider his course of events somewhat.

So how did the book end? Well, just as expected. Everyone dies. Pretty peacefully, as it happens. The government (I assume) started giving out little red pills to anyone who wanted one once the first cases appeared in the city, and all of the main characters, including John’s mum’s puppy, made good use of them. We were left with a note of hope, in that it wasn’t the end of life, merely the end of us. But… as far as I’m concerned, it’s much the same thing, at least to us. In all honesty though, I’m glad it was at least realistic in the end. Mary Holmes kept holding out hope that she and Peter and their wee baby would survive, but would you really want to be the only people left in the world? I know wouldn’t, but maybe that’s just me!