Geschreven bij On The Beach
First published in 1956, this novel is considered by many Nevil Shute’s best. It is situated in Australia in 1963 a year or so since the entire northern hemisphere has perished as a result of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, a nuclear war between the US, China and Russia. It is a post-Cold War book and a plea for non-proliferation, because all the trouble started with tiny nations gaining access to nuclear weapons and long distance bombers, i.e. Albania and Egypt. They started the trouble. I was briefly tempted to laugh out loud, but carried on reading.
What is the impact on the much smaller landmass of the southern hemisphere of no more oil, trade or news and the knowledge that the atmosphere is slowly carrying nuclear waste toward South Africa and Australia, where Darwin, Cairns and Port Morresby have already been abandoned? What is left of the rest of world? Montevideo (Uruguay) is living on borrowed time too and that is where one of the few surviving US nuclear-powered submarines is berthed following a lengthy reconnaissance of America’s east coast and Europe’s coasts and ports. Its sister ship is based near Melbourne and will make a similar voyage to e.g. Pearl Harbor, Seattle and Dutch Harbor off Alaska. Seattle is esp. interesting since hours of garbled morse signals have been picked up from the area. How the mission ends?
Shute’s style, idioms and 40-page chapters may challenge fresh readers, but not for long. This novel is also a love story and a psychological novel. How does a submarine crew cope with the loss of loved ones? How do Australians cope without fuel for cars and other scarcities and problems facing death from radiation, whose symptoms resemble cholera? Awesome novel which must have inspired Stieber & Kunetka’s “Warday” (1985), reprinted in 2015, an awesome post-nuclear novel in report form.