29. On the Beach by Nevil Shute

Well it is snarky to say but also true that this is far and away the most boring post-apocalyptic novel I have ever read.  That being said, it is also quite good and moving.  I joke a bit about it being boring, because it did hold my attention.  It’s just that I came up in the 80s and my PA worlds range from The Road Warrior to Gamma World.  On the Beach is about as calm and sober as you can get. The story is set in Melbourne and follows the lives of a few characters as they prepare for the end.  A global nuclear war, triggered by Albania (who somehow bombed Israel), which then set off Russia and China followed by the US, has covered the northern hemisphere in deadly radioactivity, which is then moving south.  Everybody knows it, nobody can avoid it and it is just a question of when the end will actually come.

The main characters are a young couple with a new baby.  He is an officer in the Australian navy and gets assigned as a liaison to a US sub (the last of two).  He meets the sub commander a nice, calm dude named Dwight, who meets and develops a platonic affair with a young Australian girl.  Dwight’s wife and children are all still in Connecticut presumably dead but he has no way of knowing.  Finally, there is a young scientist who is fixing up a beautiful old ferrari and using what fuel he can find to drive fast. The men go on a sub journey to the north, but they can’t leave the boat because the radiation is so high.  The young couple prep their garden and watch their daughter grow.  

This is a very civilized and mundane end to the world.  There is no real reason to freak out because there is nothing anybody can do.  I found it a bit unrealistic, informed I believe by Shute’s own strongly colonialist and old-school British conservative worldview.  Things do deteriorate but mostly out of neglect and people deciding to spend their final days doing what they love rather than because they go wild.  Everybody is very respectful and helpful to one another.  This is a very stiff upper lip indeed!

The first third was a bit slow-going.  The pace never picks up but the characters are very well-written and mostly quite likable.  You get absorbed in it and that is what makes the simple and expected ending so sad.  I have been aware of this book for a long time, but always avoided it for fear that it would be a bit too slow and realistic.  Well it was but I am glad I finally got to it.  It is sobering and sits with you.