On The Beach - Nevil Shute

ON THE BEACH – NEVIL SHUTE

There's nothing new under the sun and all roads still lead to Rome, which means that though 2020 is the year of the virus when people came face-to-face with their own mortality, it doesn't mean we've not been here before. As surely as empires rise so surely will they fall, whilst a civilization can be erased in the blink of an eye.

There were always going to be degrees of how seriously you took the Corona virus. For those on the front-line having to deal with it on a daily basis, for example, it was all too real and for them not to take it seriously would have been foolhardy in the extreme. For those thinking themselves to be far removed from the so-called 'front-line', any seriousness was just water off a duck's back and the whole knock-on effect of lockdown reduced to a weird inconvenience to their daily routine.

Constant comparisons have been made likening the pandemic to a war so in a continuation of that theme will children one day ask: 'What did you do in the war, daddy?' And what might be the reply? I fought on the front-line, son? I kept the home-fires burning, son? I maintained a sense of normality until things returned to normalcy, son?

Published in 1957 and set in the future of 1963, On The Beach by Nevil Shute is one of those books that appear in the Apocalyptic Literature lists that are being composed of late. It's the story of some people based around a Navy dockyard in Melbourne, Australia, as they face approaching death in the form of a tsunami of radioactive dust slowly sweeping over the world following a war between Russia and China. There are about six months left until the cloud hits Australia so death is imminent, the question being what to do and how best to live over those six months?

Some find solace and even meaning in getting drunk, some continue to work as normal so as to maintain a structure to their lives, whilst some studiously ignore it and simply pretend no such thing is going to happen. They're either being pragmatic or delusional but the interesting thing is that neither is in any way better than the other because essentially they're both coping mechanisms.

It's a bleak, dark read written at a slow, steady pace enabling the reader to get up close and personal with the characters. Without spoiling the plot too much, there's no happy ending to it. What the book does very effectively is to pose what is essentially an impossible question: How does one be happy and fulfilled if you know one day you are to die? It's a question, of course, that philosophers and some of the greatest minds ever have since time began pondered over but as far as I know there's never been one single, conclusive answer. And that in itself tells us something. Something that On The Beach conveys.

Each character in the book has or finds their own, personal way of attaining a semblance of fulfilment and happiness. All ways are equally valid. How some people choose to spend what is left of their lives is meaningless to others and vice versa. Some are simply resigned to the fact that they and everyone else will soon be dead whilst others rage against it. What many have in common, however, is a sense of being thwarted, of being cheated out of being happy by the actions of others. A sense of their unhappiness having being thrust upon them through no choice of their own. So it has always been. In On The Beach it's from those who started the war but in real life every generation has its demons, even today during the current Covid-19 pandemic there are those who are the cause of denying happiness and even life itself. And let's face it, we all know who they are.

On The Beach is relevant literature for irreverent times. It's a description of life in the raw where there is no light at the end of the tunnel so the only option is to build a light in the here and now. To light a candle rather than to curse the darkness.

John Serpico

Under Exmouth skies (Part 52)

UNDER EXMOUTH SKIES (Part 52)

Nothing really new under the sun... 

London Under - Peter Ackroyd

LONDON UNDER – PETER ACKROYD

"It's what?" asked Bill Grundy to a petulant Johnny Rotten. "Nothing. A rude word. Next question." Rotten shot back. "No, no, what was the rude word?" persisted Grundy. "Shit." replied Rotten. Which in a roundabout way brings us to Peter Ackroyd's London Under, where among many other things the author tells us all about the rivers of shit that flow beneath the streets of our capital city. It's a whole other world down there and shit, apparently, is the least of it particularly when compared to how it used to be. For example, Jonathan Swift once observed in his poem A Description Of A City Shower that: 'Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood, Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud, Dead Cats and Turnips-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.' The Flood he refers being the River Fleet, the largest and most well known of London's subterranean rivers.

Ackroyd is like a tourist-guide on an open-top bus tour of London, calling out a veritable avalanche of obscure points of interest about different places but before you can strain your neck to see, the bus has moved on and he's onto his next obscure point regarding an entirely different place. London taxi drivers are but amateurs when comparing Ackroyd's 'Knowledge' to theirs. If anything, London Under is like Guy Debord's Situationist theory of the 'derive' and psychogeography where you wander through an urban setting allowing yourself to be drawn to any experience or attraction you encounter.

Ackroyd's focus, however, is on what lies beneath. The hidden and forgotten stories of the hidden and forgotten places of the London underground. The rivers, the tunnels, the cellars, chambers, catacombs and buried amphitheatres that most people have no awareness of as they go about their daily business. The closest most ever come to them being when travelling on the Underground but even there what can be seen is but the tip of the iceberg.

Beneath the streets of London, Ackroyd informs us, innumerable rivers flow, wending their way to the Thames. Under the pavements and roads, under tower blocks, housing estates and mansions countless rivulets and streams run their course like veins under the skin. Nowadays only the names of various streets, roads and areas give any hint of these hidden tributaries and it's only when you stop and think about them that their origins make sense, having some kind of connection to water: Fleet Street, Effra Road, Coldharbour Lane, Walbrook Street, Brook Street, Holywell Street, Conduit Street, Cromwell Road, Sadler's Wells, Millbank, Bayswater, Shoreditch, Spa Fields, Deptford, Stockwell, Shadwell, Clerkenwell, Camberwell, Chadwell Heath, Bridewell, etc, etc.

For all that, it's not only water and sewage that lies beneath but also the dead. Under areas near to churches, of course, are the graveyards but also under vast areas where history has been forgotten such as plague pits, pauper burial grounds and unconsecrated ground where suicides were once buried. These are the places of myth, legend and fear where dreams, nightmares and speculations are woven. Ackroyd explores them all, even referencing the influence of the underground upon culture in such books and films as War Of The Worlds, A Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, The Time Machine and Quartermass And The Pit. It all makes for a dizzy, bewildering yet eye-opening and enlightening trip.

As with most of his books, Peter Ackroyd's attention is upon London but an interesting thing about this particular book is what it illuminates without actually giving mention to. That being how the underground worlds that he writes about are not only unique to London but applicable also to any major city throughout the UK. For example, when I was teenager I worked for a wine company based in the centre of Bristol and whilst there discovered there were tunnels and vast labyrinths beneath the streets that very few people were aware of.

The tunnels and catacombs I had first-hand experience of was where wine was stored but there were also countless extensions of those tunnels that had been bricked up that were said to have once led down to the city docks. There was also the River Frome that was covered over that went from the city dock, right under the city to emerge uncovered on the other side in the St Judes area. As in London, there are also many streets, roads and areas of Bristol whose names are connected to water. There are also pits, pipes, sewage, water and drainage systems everywhere that are not given a second thought by those walking or driving above them. Similarly, the same would apply to Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Cardiff and so on.

Anyone living in London would or should find Ackroyd's London Under a fascinating read, giving much food for thought and a whole new insight into the city that could potentially make every day-to-day journey into a whole new adventure and experience. And if indeed London Under is an example of psychogeography and the Situationist 'derive' theory then it is much more than simply a book about shit and water and underground tunnels but is in actual fact nothing less than a revolutionary guide to combat the malaise and boredom of the society of the spectacle.

John Serpico