On the Beach was the first book of Nevil Shute's I ever read and I confess that it influenced my outlook on the problem of nuclear war and human survival. Until then I secretly believed that such a world catastrophe could never happen. Mankind was too rational to destroy itself. Like many others, this did not prevent me from being active against war, but always with a certain emotional reservation, founded mainly on historical and political optimism. Nevil Shute's book, while not demolishing the optimism, qualified it greatly and made me begin to see that Bertrand Russell might be right and that the chances of human survival were not quite so good. Undoubtedly, On the Beach had a similar effect on other readers. It may have caused some to grow disheartened, but some would have drawn from it a new sense of urgency and of the terrible reality of the threat. (pp. 193-94)
On the Beach is one of the rare novels that are absolutely honest. It is not the book of a highly speculative man, and the reactions of the people in the story to their impending annihilation is curiously uncomplicated and uniform. An intellectual novelist, such as [Albert] Camus, would first of all have striven for sharper and finer differentiations; Commander Towers and Lieutenant-Commander Holmes would be anti-types. Some characters would rebel against their fate, some would face death with dignity and some without; some would welcome the last capsule as the consummation of their own death-wish; some would find God, some the Devil, and others themselves.
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