Monday, July 11, 2005
Review: On the Beach by Nevil Shute
Writing Style-6.2
Originality-7.2
Plot-7.0
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-7.1
Overall-7.1
This book was pretty good. I read its 320 pages within 24 hours so it obviously held my attention.
It’s a post-nuclear holocaust book with a fairly clever twist. It was published in 1957 at the height of nuclear war terror, but the action takes place in an imagined future in 1961-1962.
China, Russia, Europe, and the U.S. have dropped over 4,000 nuclear bombs on each other effectively wiping out the entire population in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere is insulated from the radioactivity, at first, due to the winds that swirl in opposite directions on each side of the equator in the tropics. However, the radioactivity will slowly diffuse through these winds and only give inhabitants in the southern hemisphere a brief, less than 6 months, respite from certain death.
The book is set in and around Melbourne, Australia which is geographically significant because this is the most southerly situated major city in the world. So the citizens of Melbourne will be among the last survivors of the human race.
There are four main characters an American navy man, his love interest in Australia, an Australian navy man, and his wife. The love story between the American and the Australian girl is actually quite nice. The Australian man’s wife is a complete idiot that I wanted to bitch slap into next week.
I wasn’t completely sold on the way people were reacting to the end of the world. For instance, the American goes shopping for several items within a month or two of the end and there’s no inflation? And no looting? And all the shop owners are working regular hours knowing they are about to die? Everyone’s fairly calm and their provincial manners, speaking, and attitudes in the face of this situation gets pretty annoying.
The book attempts briefly to answer the question of how we could have avoided nuclear war in this excerpt which I thought was cool:
“Newspapers,” he said. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newpapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough.”
The writing is pretty pedestrian, but in the end I was affected by the book. There are no plot twists, it is what it is. Several times it seems like it will veer into something different, but it’s pretty much about the last living people in the world dealing with a creeping cloud of radiation. If that’s your cup of tea, it’s a pretty good book.
Originality-7.2
Plot-7.0
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-7.1
Overall-7.1
This book was pretty good. I read its 320 pages within 24 hours so it obviously held my attention.
It’s a post-nuclear holocaust book with a fairly clever twist. It was published in 1957 at the height of nuclear war terror, but the action takes place in an imagined future in 1961-1962.
China, Russia, Europe, and the U.S. have dropped over 4,000 nuclear bombs on each other effectively wiping out the entire population in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere is insulated from the radioactivity, at first, due to the winds that swirl in opposite directions on each side of the equator in the tropics. However, the radioactivity will slowly diffuse through these winds and only give inhabitants in the southern hemisphere a brief, less than 6 months, respite from certain death.
The book is set in and around Melbourne, Australia which is geographically significant because this is the most southerly situated major city in the world. So the citizens of Melbourne will be among the last survivors of the human race.
There are four main characters an American navy man, his love interest in Australia, an Australian navy man, and his wife. The love story between the American and the Australian girl is actually quite nice. The Australian man’s wife is a complete idiot that I wanted to bitch slap into next week.
I wasn’t completely sold on the way people were reacting to the end of the world. For instance, the American goes shopping for several items within a month or two of the end and there’s no inflation? And no looting? And all the shop owners are working regular hours knowing they are about to die? Everyone’s fairly calm and their provincial manners, speaking, and attitudes in the face of this situation gets pretty annoying.
The book attempts briefly to answer the question of how we could have avoided nuclear war in this excerpt which I thought was cool:
“Newspapers,” he said. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newpapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault, and no government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough.”
The writing is pretty pedestrian, but in the end I was affected by the book. There are no plot twists, it is what it is. Several times it seems like it will veer into something different, but it’s pretty much about the last living people in the world dealing with a creeping cloud of radiation. If that’s your cup of tea, it’s a pretty good book.
