Nevil Shute Norway (he dropped Norway when writing) must have been fond of the beach, because he invented a beach-based weapon of mass destruction called the Panjandrum. On the Beach is instead about a bunch of miserable Melburnians waiting to die slowly and horribly from radiation poisoning after the world has been annihilated in a nuclear holocaust started by the Albanians. It’s a hard back with a yellow ribbon bookmark.I often wonder how many people bought On the Beach when it came out in 1957, assuming it was a novel about a group of gorgeous, sun-kissed surfers catching breaks all summer long.

I found this book in fairly good shape at a used book store. Whitman seemed content to only raise the question of a dying planet. But of course Jupiter is still really there. However, due to clouds soon blocking the view, the young girl thinks that the planet has gone away forever and becomes sad.

The poem is ominous in nature but is simply about a man teaching his daughter about the planet Jupiter, which they can see at night. The novel also begins with lines from Walt Whitman’s poem “ On the Beach at Night“. The phrase “On the Beach” is a Royal Navy term signifying “retired from service”. The New York Times said of the novel, “the most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.” Their attempts to live their last days as normally as possible conflict with the horrifying knowledge that they are at the terminus.

The characters highly suspect that radiation is drifting down to them after having wiped out the rest of the world. I read the book several years ago and was greatly disturbed by it but still have the book up there among one of my favorites ever. The novel was published in 1957 and takes place in Melbourne, Australia, following the days of the last live people on earth. I still read about On the Beach in modern news articles as media asks “what novel on climate change will wake people up like On the Beach did for nuclear weaponry?” It is one among many prophetic type books that has predicted doom and apocalypse, but the book also impacted its readers heavier than most other novels do. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is credited as an example of fiction that changed the way we think about a major world problem or issue, in this case nuclear war and weapons.

On the beach nevil