Looking the monster in the eye

This classic’s power to shock the first-time reader hasn’t waned and it continues to provoke questions about humanity’s capacity for self-destruction.

Now that the first works of climate change fiction are trickling in, you wonder why the prospect of an apocalypse due to environmental catastrophe hasn’t spurred the creative impulses of artists in the way that the prospect of a nuclear war proved to be a fertile ground for imagination in the mid-20th century.

Back then, a number of writers and filmmakers grappled with the idea of the annihilation of the species in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the Cuban missile crisis in the early 60s proved to be further fuel for thinkers to consider what it means for the world as we know it to end in a mushroom cloud.

The effects of large-scale nuclear war on earth and its aftermath were not studied to a great deal by scientists around the time that On the Beach, Nevil Shute’s classic of post-apocalyptic fiction, was published in 1957. The novel starts after the war (confined to the northern hemisphere and triggered by a conflict in Europe that gradually escalates to more countries) is done and human civilisation is on the brink of extinction.

Set in Melbourne in Australia, which is one of the few remaining cities on the planet where life is still going on with some semblance of normality, On the Beach is an exploration of how humans would behave with the near-certain knowledge that the end is nigh. Unlike most works of post-apocalyptic fiction, the almost stoic Australians in On the Beach don’t descend into hysteria and hot-blooded impulses. The one romance that blooms between an alcoholic socialite Moira Davidson and Commander Dwight Towers, an American naval officer, remains platonic.

As the story starts, a radiation cloud is moving southwards and towns in northern Australia are slowly and silently dying. When a message in Morse Code is received from Seattle, Commander Towers (who’s been in charge of a USS submarine in Melbourne under the Australian command) and a small crew set off northwards to search for survivors. And to learn if there is hope that humankind can survive after all.

Nevil Shute was born in England in 1899 and migrated to Australia in 1950. While he had begun writing in 1923 and had established his reputation as an author of the kind of fiction that valorised the contributions of the professional middle class, he had a parallel career as an aeronautical engineer. On the Beach was one of his last novels to be published — he died in 1960 — and it became a modern classic. At the time of its publication, it was taken as a warning for nuclear powers to step back from the brink before it was too late. Decades later, its power to shock the first-time reader hasn’t waned and it continues to provoke questions about humanity’s capacity for self-destruction. The book was criticised for being too pessimistic and not giving enough credit for the world’s preparedness in case of nuclear fallout. Shute’s story doesn’t give much of a chance for human survival — and there could be an argument made that the narrative would lose its power had it provided the reader a ray of hope and if it had been framed as a tale of unvanquished human courage. But it’s also courage to look a monster in the eye and realise when the fight is lost and it is courageous to accept that loss with grace.

The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.