Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 25 Jan 2016

On The Beach by Nevil Shute

Somehow I’ve grown up thinking of Nevil Shute as a plodding second division author. I’m not sure what I base this on given that until now I had never read anything he produced – maybe just the fact that he was Australian was enough.

I was aware that his books had been turned into films – On The Beach and A Town Like Alice seemed to me, unfairly I suspect, staples of those dull, turgid Sunday afternoons when my whole life seemed to be in black and white. So, it was something of an act of rebellion against my youth to pick up a copy of On The Beach and to finally get around to reading it.

And what an odd book it is. Published in 1957 at the start of the Cold War neurosis about Mutually Assured Destruction and the nuclear threat of annihilation, Shute sets the action primarily in Melbourne – the last outpost of civilisation after a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust has wiped out the whole of the Northern hemisphere. We also know everyone in the book is doomed – slowly the whole world is being engulfed in a poisonous fallout that will extinguish all life on Earth.

Here in a naval shipyard on the south coast of Australia a tiny cast of characters plays out the odd ritual of passing time until they die : an American Commander of a submarine and his Australian liaison officer, a scientist, the Liaison Offer’s wife and a young woman distantly related to the scientist but emotionally involved with the Commander. The submarine goes on a series of futile missions, rumours proliferate, the toxic radiation cloud edges ever closer and they all die.  That just about takes care of the plot.

What makes this novel so incredibly odd is what Shute does with the characters. Some are drinking themselves to death, others take to wish fulfilment fantasies involving fast cars and others are simply in denial but all of them play out this time in a rigid parody of ordinary, middle class, Australian suburban life. In Shute’s odd, hermetically-sealed world people continue going to work, continue to get the milk, plan for their future, take college courses and have dinner parties. There are no riots, no mass movements of refugees and no breaking of social and moral codes.

It is almost as if these people are trapped in some kind of surreal bubble of time that will and must eventually pop. What looks like a ploddingly hyper-real two-dimensional story that turns its back on the realities of human nature actually turns out to be something quite special. Whilst it is true that this is Shute’s scream of frustration over the global political situation in the late 1950s, I think he is trying to do something more than a simple protest of nuclear madness. What he seems to be doing is using the nuclear scenario as a sort of catalyst to speed up and highlight the essential ordinariness and pointlessness of modern life. These people live out a life which, if allowed to, would in likelihood have developed in exactly the same way but over years rather than months. Is the blind futility of this kind of suburbia partly responsible for the inevitability of its own destruction?

In his play Heartbreak House George Bernard Shaw introduces us to people who are so cosseted, so immune from real feelings the the only thing that real cuts through and makes them feel alive is the prospect of their own destruction. I can’t help but feel Shute is making a similar point about the analgesic qualities of Western suburban life.

Having said all that, I think Shute probably was a second division author. His ideas are interesting but I still find the execution flat and characterless. For me the people he creates don’t really live and their individual voices never feel sufficiently idiosyncratic  - all the men are brusque and manly and too often the women are stupid or malleable. I don’t think this is deliberate satire on gender attitudes either – it feels to me that this is how Shute sees the sexes.

I also think the suspension of disbelief is difficult in this book. I know Shute wasn’t interested in creating a Mad Max post-apocalypse but equally the notion that in the circumstances there would not be mass migrations of refugees, that society would just keep on keeping on with no challenges to authority or order is just too hard to sustain.

So, all in all, still second division - but maybe somewhere near the top?

 

Terry Potter

January 2016