Shute makes it clear there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about this. And the radioactive fallout generated during the conflict is now creeping - slowly but surely - into the southern hemisphere. A massive nuclear war has devastated the entire northern hemisphere, wiping out all forms of life there. Shute brings the reader up to speed after the dinner party wraps up. They are trying very hard to forget that they are all going to be dead from radiation poisoning in a matter of months. The reason why the guests at Peter's party are so keen to avoid serious talk is both simple and depressing. In spite of the wide-open windows behind the fly wire, the room grew full of cigarette smoke. In the warm night the room grew hotter and hotter, coats and ties were jettisoned at an early stage, and the gramophone went on working through an enormous pile of records, half of which Peter had borrowed for the evening. The atmosphere is both claustrophobic and delirious:įor three hours they danced and drank together, sedulously avoiding any serious topic of conversation. This comes to the fore in the following passage, which focuses on a dinner party hosted by Lieutenant Commander Peter Holmes of the Royal Australian Navy. In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.Īs in Eliot's poem, the characters that cluster together in the pages of Shute's novel, set in and around Melbourne between 19, tend on occasion to avoid speech. (Shute spent time in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War II.) However, as readers of Eliot's poetry will know, the phrase also appears late in The Hollow Men: The title of On the Beach - which started life as a four-part story called The Last Days on Earth - ostensibly referred to a Royal Navy expression for reassignment. As well as writing novels, he worked as an aeronautical engineer. Journalist Gideon Haigh calls On the Beach "arguably Australia's most important novel - important in the sense of confronting a mass international audience with the defining issue of the age".īritish-born Shute emigrated in 1950 to Australia, where he lived outside Melbourne.
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