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| The lst British edition cover 1957 |
The novel is On The Beach by Nevil Shute. As an end-of-the-world novel, it has a particular resonance right now.
Nevil Shute was a British engineer and mid-20th century novelist, popular in the UK especially though little remembered now. Several of his novels have been made into movies and television mini-series over the years, including this one. Disillusioned with his native UK, Shute moved to Australia, and this novel is in many ways a descriptive tribute to his adopted country.
Its premise is ingenious, for it enables Shute to write about the consequences of nuclear war without actually depicting the devastation. When published in 1957, it was a near future novel, set in the early 1960s. About a year before the novel starts, the world suffered a brief but supremely devastating nuclear war. Many if not all of the bombs used were "cobalt" bombs, atomic bombs that pack extra radiation. Such bombs were theoretically possible, and theorized as Doomsday devices. In Shute's novel, radiation has killed everyone in the northern hemisphere: North America, Europe, Asia, northern Africa. Its deadly radiation is slowly moving south and around the globe. The novel, set in Melbourne, begins when that city has about six months left.
So when the story starts, Australia has had six months to absorb and confirm all this. The government has manufactured and distributed suicide pills to its citizens, suggesting they be taken at the first signs of radiation sickness.
The novel follows an American submarine captain in Australia, and the people he meets. These Australians are coping as best they can with their ordinary lives. There are some everyday changes--mostly that there is little gasoline, since it all came from the northern hemisphere. (There's no Mad Max in this book.)
The style of the book is straightforward, almost pastoral at times. Many of the characters are in the military or work with it, and their respect for facts is absolute. They continue to seek knowledge and don't shy away from what they find. They face having no future with the absurd but almost beautiful and certainly touching combination of accepting it while ignoring it. A young couple plans their garden, and their child's education. A farmer plants his crops.
The US Navy captain knows his family in Connecticut is probably dead but acts as if they are not. He buys his children presents. Everyone speaks of the faraway dead as if they are still alive, faraway cities as if they are still functioning. Yet no one is deluded. The young Australian officer makes sure he will be home from sea duty in plenty of time to spend the last months with his family.
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| The 1959 Signet edition I'm reading |
But there is also healthy denial, and the Australians in this novel illustrate it. The US captain and an Australian woman friend are discussing the young couple who are planning their garden for the next ten years. They speculate on what's going through their heads, but the captain finally says: "The thing is, they just kind of like to plan a garden. Don't you go and spoil it for them, telling them they're crazy."
"I wouldn't do that." She stood silent for a minute. "None of us really believe it's ever going to happen--not to us," she said at last. "Everybody's crazy on that point, one way or another."
"You're very right," he said emphatically.
Certainly there is an underlying desperation to what some of the characters do, but mainly they face the end with grace. Part of what enables that grace is an active, healthy sort of denial that allows them to act, to share, to give and to perceive, without becoming paralyzed by anxiety and despair. That includes acting and planning for an illusory future, because that's an activity of the present that defines their lives.
These days we are living the ongoing consequences of toxic denial. But without some healthy denial, it might be impossible to get through the day.
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