On The Beach was Shute’s most celebrated novel, published in 1957 when nuclear annihilation was still a somewhat novel and nebulous threat, rather than its own pop-culture genre.
The novel takes place mostly in Melbourne, Australia, as a cloud of nuclear ‘dust’ descends from the northern to the southern hemisphere. The dust originated from over 4,000 nuclear detonations, set off in a brief but cataclysmic war between most of the world’s major and minor powers. The USA, Russia, and China are all named, but it seems in this alternate reality most countries were armed with nuclear devices, so as soon as one bomb was launched mutual destruction was virtually guaranteed.
The last surviving nuclear submarine commander from the USA Navy, Dwight Towers, takes refuge with his crew in Australia and is tasked with completing a series of expeditions north to determine the severity of damage and the lasting effects of the war. While ashore in Australia, Dwight attracts the attention of local party girl Moira Davidson, whom he meets by virtue of her friendship with Royal Australian Navy lieutenant commander Peter Holmes. Moira is partying and grieving the life she’ll never have, and Peter is balancing his devotion to the armed forces with his devotion to his wife Mary and new baby Jennifer. Moira’s cousin John Osborne has a role to play as well, as a CSIRO nuclear scientist drafted to assist the navy submarine’s expeditions.
Each character is burdened with knowledge of the impending end of the world, and each reacts uniquely. Dwight and Moira form a surprisingly wholesome friendship, as Moira now has a focus for her last days other than drinking brandy, and Dwight has an anchor to keep him tethered to the world despite the loss of his family in Connecticut. Peter learns the need to take command of his family, as Mary refuses to accept her new reality. John pours his sense of hopelessness into living his long-held and unrequited dream of becoming a race car driver. But amazingly, none neglect their duties in the face of inevitable end.
The entirety of the novel could be boiled down to the very famous line from T. S Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
I was left weeping at this novel. Partly because it was so utterly tragic and inevitable, but also out of a strange sense of jealousy. The were no ‘nuclear deniers’ imagined. No ‘anti-vaxxer’ equivalent. Corporations and commodities kept producing (as well as they could) out of a sense of duty for the survivors. Communities came together and social prejudices lessened. The gulf between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ appeared to narrow rather than widen. The media communicated messaging responsibly and strategically, and the government quietly mass-produced suicide pills to allow for a dignified death.
I feel that Shute lovingly and meticulously crafted a best-case end of world scenario, where people’s humanity won out over individualism…. But this reality we are living now has showed me that our true end will not be in loving embraces and communal support. And to me, that is the hardest pill to swallow.
5 little red pill boxes out of 5.