On the Beach (novel)
First edition cover
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| Author | Nevil Shute |
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| Cover artist | John Rowland |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Post-apocalyptic novel |
| Publisher | Heinemann |
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Publication date
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1957 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) |
| Pages | 312 pp |
On the Beach is a 1957 post-apocalyptic novel written by British-Australian author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere following a nuclear war a year previously. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently.
Shute's initial story appeared as a four-part series, The Last Days on Earth, in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic in April 1957. For the novel, Shute expanded on the storyline. The story has been adapted twice as a film (in 1959 and 2000) and once as a BBC radio broadcast in 2008.
The phrase "on the beach" is a Royal Navy term that means "retired from the Service." The title also refers to the T. S. Eliot poem The Hollow Men, which includes the lines:
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
Printings of the novel, including the first 1957 edition by William Morrow and Company, NY, contain extracts from the poem on the title page, under Shute's name, including the above quotation and the concluding lines:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The 2000 film ends with a quote from a Walt Whitman poem entitled "On the Beach at Night", describing how frightening an approaching cloud bank seemed at night to the poet's child, blotting the stars out one by one, as the father and child stood on the beach on Massachusetts' North Shore. As much as it resembles the plot of Shute's novel, the book gives no reference to the Whitman poem while the Eliot poem is presented in the book's front matter.
The story is set primarily in and around Melbourne, Australia, in 1963. World War III has devastated most of the populated world, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and killing all human and animal life in the Northern Hemisphere. The war began with a nuclear attack by Albania on Italy and then escalated with the bombing of the United States and the United Kingdom by Egypt. Because the aircraft used in these attacks were obtained from the Soviet Union, the Soviets were mistakenly blamed, triggering a retaliatory strike on the Soviet Union by NATO.
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Wikipedia