What I Am Reading - On The Beach

On The Beach

Nevil Shute

Read it in paperback @ 312 pages.

July's OLT book club pick brought to you by the one who often picks post-apocalyptic, sees once again, another classic post-apocalyptic book.  His past choice in the genre saw us reading Earth Abides, and despite its sordid reception from OLT, onward with the next classic in the genre.

On The Beach, written in 1957, pointedly for the time tells the story of a world catastrophe.  Through deception the United States is the victim of a nuclear bomb attach which causes reprisal strikes and a  degrading situation for the entire world as nuclear holocaust ensues.  Lucky, or unlucky, for some, the only remaining population of humans exist in the southern hemisphere of the globe in Australia.  The unfortunate thing is that naturally the radiation is following currents and air trends on a southerly route to eventually consume the entire globe in fallout.  When most of the northern hemisphere has gone dark and those on the fringes of what's still habitable are facing their impending doom there is suddenly a signal from a communications center in the north, in what should be uninhabitable.

The books primary focus are on this signal and how people in the southern hemisphere deal with impending desolation.  At a time when the world was experimenting and creating nuclear arms at an unprecedented level the world was scared of what could come, this book captured those fears and the consequences of what could happen.   

-Spoilers Below-

So how did this classic match up to OLT's standards of fine book selection?  With a score of 1 being a candidate for rolling papers and a 10 being the next Pulitzer, let's see where On The Beach ended up with the 7 of 10 completing it.

Hylen: 6

BoozyCoug: 3

Th3ee: 3

G$$: 2

Shely-the-don: 3

SS: 3

Dust: 3

For us, it averaged out to 3.28 which is only .02 from being our worst selection ever.  Why so low you ask?

Well, for a lot of us, we just felt there wasn't much to the book (this is the spoiler bit.)  For us the book covered two things.  The first being the encroaching nuclear winter in which you get no view into its beginning.  It is all hearsay and general anecdotes about what happened.  A 'shots fired' chapter or a glimpse of what happened to begin with from the view point of one of the characters would have covered this nicely, instead we get nothing.  We know it's coming and generalities but all of the excitement of a nuclear war is just gone.  The second, and the point of the book, is how the last remnants of humanity deal with impending doom.  This was the controversial part of our discussion.  Many felt that the fall was too soft and devoid of the panic that you would expect when people are faced with no chance of survival.  At least many of us felt that way.  To make matters worse, the survivors fill their end times with different activities that just didn't seem to fit in with the story as a whole.  A lot of us were really expecting more from this book.  The inevitably of the demise also means you see what's coming long before the end transpires.

Overall, I bet this book would have been a huge success for OLT if we read it in 1957, instead reading it 2013 we felt that it was just too dated to be applicable.