![]() ![]() Either messy deaths due to radioactive poisoning, or swift deaths due to cyanide pills. Who is to blame? The explanations would be hilarious in their complexity, if not for the implied question: who is not to blame? The people of Australia wait the 7 or 8 months for the radioactivity to drift southwards. Some kind of complicated mix-up happened, and nuclear war has devastated the Northern Hemisphere. The small accommodations and rationalizations all go on, the same that brought us to Shute's beach, and the same that let us meekly wave goodbye. ![]() Palpable despair makes the book unforgettable, if only in what it says about us as a race. The reader rebels, wants out of the trap, but Shute is relentless. On the Beach has no particular level of suspense, no thrills, and only one, inevitable way to close. Would the countries of 1963 (the time period the novel is set in) really have nuked the hell out of each other for no sane reason? Shute the prophet and Shute the writer of thrillers co-exist uneasily, and the result is both close to reality (Cuban Missile Crisis anyone? India-Pakistan?) and the purest stuff of nightmares. The book infuriates the reader with its insistence on the mundane, the almost hallucinatory day-to-day tedium of living with the end of the human race. On the Beach is a surreal journey into the darkness of the Nuclear Age. On the Beach, Nevil Shute, Ballantine, 1980, 278 pp. ![]()
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