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