This dystopian novel was the first smash hit of the nuclear-apocalypse genre
‘On the Beach’ played to the anxieties of the Cold War reading public
About two-thirds of the way through Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, a nuclear-powered submarine surveys the apocalyptic damage on the West Coast of North America. Those aboard the vessel find a collapsed Golden Gate Bridge and a decimated San Francisco. A seven-mile ashen scar is burned into the landscape of Vancouver Island, marking the detonation of a nuclear bomb. The town of Edmonds, Washington, appears to have fared better — its structures are still standing — but no place has been spared the radiation fallout. When an intrepid member of the crew inspects the town, he is delighted by the sight of seven partiers around a table. Then reality strikes. “The party had been going on for more than a year,” says the narrator. “The people were dead and had been there for a very long time.”
By 1955, cinema had caught up with the zeitgeist, providing several, often low-budget visions of nuclear war and apocalypse, including Five (1951), Captive Women (1952), and Unknown World (1952), in which an unlivable nuclear surface forces the few survivors to seek shelter underground. But fiction was slow to respond to the new frontier of nuclear annihilation, in a world post-Nagasaki, post-Hiroshima, and post-Soviet nuclear armament.
Nevil Shute Norway, a British aeronautical engineer by trade, became an unlikely pioneer of the fiction of nuclear apocalypse when On the Beach was published in 1957. He was not alone. John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, for instance, about a cult-like community of survivors of nuclear war, was released in 1955, but there remained a paucity of stories daring to deal with nuclear apocalypse. Then came Shute’s novel, which was serialized in 39 newspapers and sold 100,000 copies in the U.S. within its first six weeks, displacing the popular Peyton Place atop the bestseller list. Soon after, it was adapted into a movie starring Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire. The popularity attested to the public’s anxieties about the brave new world in which they lived.
In the book, a brief World War III wipes out life in the Northern Hemisphere. Survivors are scattered across the south, including Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South America and Africa. But they too live under a death sentence. Radiation and nuclear dust are gradually approaching, and promise to wipe out the rest of humanity by the end of the year.
On the Beach places the reader in Australia, where a handful of characters are waiting out the remaining time, around six months, before the nuclear cloud arrives. The protagonist, Peter Holmes, is a member of the Australian navy, and is sent on a voyage in a nuclear-powered submarine along the coast to Seattle, to investigate the source of a mysterious Morse code signal periodically sent over the radio.
The reader might be delighted to find that post-apocalyptic life, at least in Nevil Shute’s vision, is rather decorous. It is certainly no Eden — all the characters bear the dread of imminent death. But at the same time, they go about their lives as best as they can. There is a major fuel shortage, but the farmer still sells his milk and the stores still sell their goods. The pharmacist is open to explain to Holmes the government’s plan to supply its citizens with suicide capsules. The reader is informed of no riots, no bands of ruthless marauders, no bunkers where the armed and afraid are holed up. One of the few, if not the only instances of violence the reader hears of is a throwaway line about a sailor dying in a street fight.
Instead, the drama is confined to the pathological and the intimate. One Moira Davidson drinks and reconciles with approaching death. Dwight Towers, a surviving American officer, cannot come to terms with the death of his family in Connecticut, and buys a fishing rod to one day give to his dead son. Before departing on his mission, Peter argues with his wife Mary about administering their daughter a lethal injection before they end their own lives. The rest of the survivors’ time is defined by a kind of Hemingwayesque defiance amid defeat, best exemplified by Mary’s attitude toward sunny weather. “All news was bad and a sensible person did not think about it,” we’re told. “It was a beautiful day. That was the important thing.”
The book was well-reviewed and lauded by critics. The New York Times called it “the most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.” The Guardian credits the novel with “raising awareness about the threat of nuclear war,” and the Economist has called it “still incredibly moving after nearly half a century.” Nevil Shute was not a fan of the 1959 adaptation, in part because filmmakers did away with important character decisions, such as Towers’s choice not to sleep with Moira Davidson lest he betrays his hope of a living wife. Still, it resonated with audiences, “many of whom wept openly” after viewing.
Toward the end of On the Beach, when death is but days away, Holmes and others take to saving their last bit of fuel to race luxury cars, considering death by adventure preferable to cyanide or radiation poisoning. Commerce inevitably grinds to a halt, too. “Nobody cared about money anymore,” says the narrator. “If you wanted food, you took it from the shops. If you couldn’t find any, you went to another place. There was plenty of time because there was no work to do.”
One of the most startling and plausible features of Shute’s post-apocalyptic vision is a deliberate muddling of the details of armageddon. In On the Beach, World War III consists of a brief 37 days of massive tactical warfare, leaving very little time for humanity to write chronicles of its own demise. The survivors know the bullet points; that nuclear war had begun with Albania, which bombed Naples. No one knows who bombed Tel Aviv. They know that afterward Egypt bombed London and Washington D.C., killing politicians and top military leaders. This led surviving officials to mistakenly bomb the Soviet Union because the Russian-built bombers bore Cyrillic insignia. Then Russia and China went to war, for reasons not fully explicable. The details regarding who bombed whom is just as mysterious to the survivors as why.
The submarine trip to Seattle yields nothing. The sailors find hydroelectric generators have kept the power grid alive, while a swinging window sash knocking into a telegraph was responsible for the intermittent radio signals. Peter returns home from the mission to join his family and the other characters as they accept their fate and swallow cyanide. They cling to as much dignity as possible in the face of the senseless and the inevitable.
