Dwight Towers is an American naval officer in command of a nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Scorpion, on an extended mission with the Australian navy. The Scorpion has to work closely with the Australians because it's the only U.S. submarine left, and the Australians are the only navy: nuclear war has ravaged almost all of the northern hemisphere, as far as anyone can tell, and poisonous radioactive wind is creeping farther and farther down into the Southern hemisphere where it kills everyone it reaches. For Towers and others in the area around Melbourne, the southernmost major city in the world, the world's end comes as a slow ebbing away of communication: they lose communication with Montevideo, then Cape Town, then northern Australian cities like Darwin and Cairns. Towers' wife and children in Connecticut are almost certainly dead, just as he'll be in about six months.
On the Beach tackles similar existential fears as Dr. Bloodmoney and Station Eleven: what will the world be like after widespread disaster? Dick and St. John Mandel both imagine that mass death will create a kind of sea change in human culture, including a return to pre-technological practices and structures. But what's scary about On the Beach is that it believes that, in the face of human extinction, almost nothing will change at all. People in Melbourne still go to work; they go to church. People shop and plant gardens and have dinner parties. Of course, it's more like Children of Men than it is those novels, because what is facing these characters is not new birth but certain destruction, but the contrast there is instructive, too. Here, extinction brings not violence, not new religion, but repression and denial.
On the Beach seems like such a product of its time. It's an artifact not just of the nuclear paranoia of the 50's (it was written in 1957), but the bourgeois variety of repression that's so recognizable from mid-century fiction. Release does come in strange and subtle--but sometimes explosive--ways: Towers' romantic interest, a young Melburnian named Moira Davidson, drinks and drinks and drinks, but even she ends up enrolling in a typing-and-shorthand course. Submarine science officer John Osborne chases his dream of being a grand prix auto driver, and the races he enters are wild bloodbaths that kill driver after driver, an expression of a sublimated death wish. But release never overcomes the will to keep things going as normal: Towers not only refuses to sleep with Moira out of loyalty to his certainly dead wife, he persists in imagining that when the radiation sickness takes him, he'll be going "home" to Connecticut, even going so far as to buy gifts for his children. His Australian hosts, the Holmeses, are busy planting next year's tulip bulbs; the Mrs. Holmes reacts with violent denial when her husband tries to show her exactly what they'll need to do to euthanize their infant daughter when the time comes.
Other apocalyptic novels are scary and showy, but I'm not sure I've read one as bleak as this one. Little by little, optimism and denial turn out to be misplaced: the Scorpion sails all the way to Seattle to check out a mysterious radio signal that turns out to be a busted window frame rocking on a panel of buttons. A scientist's insistence that the radioactive wind will dissipate before reaching the southern latitudes proves, as expected to be wishful thinking, and it's hard not to think about the many deniers of climate disaster who are with us today. We're just not wired for apocalyptic thinking, Shute says, not really, and few human qualities are as strong as inertia. Not that it matters; there's nothing to do. But unlike Dick and St. John Mandel, both of whom seem to believe that disaster might at least free us from our bourgeois attachments, Shute thinks we're likely to whimper into the grave. That's what makes it maybe the scariest post-apocalyptic novel of all.
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