There are those films you've seen: 'The Day After Tomorrow', '2012', 'The Day The Earth Stood Still', that use a sledghammer to batter you with their themes of climate change and man's illtreament of the planet; as a result, we've filed such important issues into the schlock drawer of disaster movie camp that can never really happen.
Not so with 'On The Beach'.
The characters in this novel do little more than try to quietly live out the last months of their lives, each accepting and preparing for their inevitable death. There are no violent heroic last ditch attempts to beat death or to prolong this inevitability. There are no forced romances. There is no real plot. Instead, you have a snapshot of how decent people make the most out of the time they have, and then die.
As a result, 'On the Beach's message is ultimately far more powerful and when the end comes, you feel suitably moved. You have put yourself in the characters' shoes and have walked around a bit in them, thinking if you would have their strength in the final analysis. Shute forces you to consider how easily such an event came to happen. Clearly, in Modern History the Cuban Missile Crisis did bring the world to the brink of such a catastrophe. Yet, if we think that it could not happen again, we are sadly naive.
Shute's novel should therefore transcend its historic context and remind every reader, in whatever time period they discover it, that we must not permit such an event to take place.
This is our collective responsibility.
EDIT
The reviewers who cite bad plotting and weak dialogue are somewhat missing the point. If you are looking for a tightly plotted thriller or doomsday actioneer, this is not for you. This is really a snapshot of very ordinary lives threatened by the extraordinary. The bleak nature of the ending is an inevitability and inescapable fact from the very first few pages. Yes, in some ways it is slow as each character tries to make the most of their lives and to some extent deny the reality they are faced with. The examples of 'made up' dialogue a previous reviewer mentioned illustrate that very fact. These criticisms actually highlight the novel's strengths.
Philip Larkin once said: 'Man's most remarkable talent is for ignoring death. For once the certainty of permanent extinction is realized, only a more immediate calamity can dislodge it from the mind, and then only temporarily....'
I believe those words most fittingly describe the reactions and actions of Shute's characters.
