MAINSTREAM--"On the Beach," Nevil Shute, 1957
On the Beach, a novel by Nevil Shute, Wm Morrow & Co., New York, 1957
The Author
Born on 17 January 1899 in Ealing, London. After attending the Dragon School and Shrewsbury School, he studied Engineering Science at Balliol College, Oxford. He worked as an aeronautical engineer and published his first novel, Marazan, in 1926. In 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton and they went on to have two daughters. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons. After the war he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death on 12 January 1960. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), No Highway (1948), A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957).
The Era
The Characters
Dwight Towers - Captain of the American nuclear submarine. Dwight is a practical, rational man, he continues to believe that his family is still alive.
Moira Davidson - Single socialite young woman, dances and drinks as approaching radiation means she won’t fulfill her dreams.
Peter Holmes - A lieutenant commander in the Royal Australian Navy. He fears a mission at sea would mean his wife and young baby may not be alive when the ship returns to Australia.
Mary Holmes - Peter's wife. she refuses to accept that her world is coming to an end.
John Osborne - Scientist with CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, faces the reality of his impending death. He is assigned to the mission the submarine makes and later participates in a road race in his Ferrari.
There are others, most of whom play some important part of the story, but the main plot is centered around this ensemble cast with no real main character(s) assuming lead roles.
The Story
Dwight Towers is the last US Navy commander and arrives in Melbourne because the Northern Hemisphere has been contaminated with radiation and everybody north of the equator has perished in several thousand atomic detonations. The fallout cloud slowly descends south toward Australia and those who remain alive count the days until their assured deaths.
Day to day existence goes on as normal people consider planting flowers, going on their vacations and shopping as if nothing was going to happen. In the meantime, unexpected developments create a set of circumstances that affect all of the characters in the ensemble. Towers is ordered to sail to Seattle where a mysterious Morse code signal has been retransmitted continuously but with no intelligible meaning. It didn’t make sense.
The submarine, the USS Scorpion, nuclear powered, had the capability to stay underwater long enough to make the journey up the Australian coast to check on the progress of the deadly cloud closing in on Melbourne, enroute to Washington state where the signal was being transmitted.
Peter Holmes and John Osborne were both tasked to go along on the mission to gather data for the Australian navy.
Moira
The socialite Moira Davidson refuses to accept her fate as Dwight attempts to explain to her in detail the problem.
“There
never was a bomb dropped in the Southern Hemisphere,” she said angrily.
“Why must it come to us? Can’t anything be done to stop it?”
He shook his head.
“Not a thing. It’s the winds. It’s mighty difficult to dodge what’s carried on the wind.”
“It’s not so difficult to understand, really,” he said.
“In each hemisphere the winds go around in great whorls, thousands of miles across, between the pole and the equator. There’s a circulatory system of winds in the Northern Hemisphere and another in the Southern Hemisphere. But what divides them isn’t the equator that
you see on a globe. It’s a thing called the Pressure Equator, and that shifts north and south with the season.
In January the whole of Borneo and Indonesia is in the northern system, but in July the division has shifted away up north, so that all of India and Siam, and everything that’s to the south of that, is in the southern system.
So, in January the northern winds carry the radioactive dust from the fall-out down into Malaya, say. Then in July that’s in the southern system, and our own winds pick it up and carry it down here. That’s the reason why it’s coming to us slowly.”
He smiled at her gently.
“The Rue de Rivoli may still be there, with things in the shop windows and everything. I wouldn’t know if Paris got a bomb or not. Maybe it’s all there still, just as it was, with the sun shining down the street the way you’d want to see it.”
She got restlessly to her feet.
“That’s not the way I wanted to see it. A city of dead people.”
Seattle
Dwight went forward and found Lieutenant Sunderstrom sitting in the radiation suit complete but for the helmet and the pack of oxygen bottles, smoking a cigarette.
One end of the window frame projected outside the building and teetered gently in the light breeze. One of the upper corners rested on an overturned Coke bottle on the desk. The transmitting key lay underneath the frame that rested unstably above it, teetering a little in the wind.
He reached out and touched it with his gloved hand. The frame rocked on the transmitting key, and the needle of a milli-ammeter upon the set flipped upwards. He released the frame, and the needle fell back.
The End
Following a rather exciting road race in which Osborne is the victor, the novel comes to a close with all of the characters given a choice in how they want to face the end. The first option is to wait it out and suffer the effects of a terminal dose of radiation, which the author shares in a detailed description. The second option is far more acceptable in the form of cyanide pills neatly packaged to soothe the nerves.
As the cloud descends, the lines get longer at the locations where the pills are being distributed. The Holmes are forced to decide how to take the life of their newborn child before taking their own.
Moira also accepts her fate stoically and Commander Towers has made the decision to take the USS Scorpion out to sea and with the crew on board, sink it. His crew agrees to go down with the ship. Moira watches from her car on a cliff as the submarine sails away, then takes the pill.
Analysis
IMAGE: The novelist creates striking scenes throughout, with detailed descriptions of not just ordinary life as the cloud slowly descends on southern Australia, but the complexity of the surviving military staff to understand its implications.
The mission to Seattle is a stark and intriguing center point of the novel that illustrates fate at its finest hour, the Morse code key with the ghost radioman in the form of a dangling windowsill. Note here that the feature-length film directed by Stanley Kramer and released in 1959 by United Artists failed to capture the essence of this most striking imagery of the entire novel, opting for the coke bottle variation instead. It was impossible to recreate visually, only in fictionalized writing.
CHARACTER: Although many of the ensemble principals appear a little too predictable and stock, they all have moments of expressing their emotions, self-doubts, shortcomings with facing an unfulfilled life. They blame everyone but themselves for the impending doom, especially those who lived in the Northern Hemisphere, where the war began. Others, such as the higher echelon military characters, remain cool headed, still searching for solutions until the very end, knowing all too well there isn’t one.
SETTING: Faraway places devastated by thousands of atomic detonations are brought to life and reflected diametrically opposite to the serenity of Australia, the last bastion for humanity. The ominous cloud hangs over not just most of the world but also in the minds of those few remaining who are doomed by its semi-invisible presence, read on a Geiger counter.
RESOLUTION: The novel ends predictably with the last of the ensemble one by one signing off.
Credits
Bio & Photo, http://www.nevilshute.org/
Sputnik, https://www.razorrobotics.com/russians-launch-sputnik-satellite-into-space/
Berlin Wall, https://news.usc.edu/71860/remembering-the-night-the-berlin-wall-went-up-and-when-it-came-down/
Khrushchev, https://writingqueen.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/global-communication-today/
A-bomb photo, https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/A-bomb_testing_1957.html
Character Review Notes (edited), https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/onthebeach/characters/
Story Summary (edited), https://www.enotes.com/topics/beach
On The Beach, e-Pub, https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20131214
Coke Bottle, http://mark-markmywords.blogspot.com/2014/09/movie-review-stanley-kramers-on-beach.html
Film Poster, http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/v22vodart/3072/p3072_v_v8_aa.jpg