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 t...

The basic idea for what would become On the Beach grew out of the wishful thinking then current in Australia: that radiation from a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere would be held above the equator by the trade winds. Shute's first intention seems to have been to write a kind of modern Swiss Family Robinson about the continuation of civilization in Australia…. The idea for the book "started as a joke," Shute told a friend. "Now that I was living in Australia I kidded ...

[In On the Beach] Shute portrays the end of all men upon earth. Not on a planetary or cosmic scale, but through the eyes and hearts of utterly convincing persons, Shute carries the reader to the radioactive death of man, after a third world war. The story and its motion picture are by now well known to many of us. And we have all shared in the pain-filled pages of the novel. It is what lies beyond or beneath the obviously depressing portrayal that makes this work something more than a story well told. When ...

There is always a temptation when an author dies to pay him greater homage in retrospect than was ever given during his lifetime. It is both unnecessary and inappropriate in the case of Nevil Shute … to perform extensive ceremonial rites. A simple memorial service will do, and even this may be more than he would have wanted, or expected…. He was not an important writer, although in terms of influence he wrote, with "On the Beach," at least one important book. You approached him, ...

If ["On the Beach"] … is ever televised, there may be a wilder stampede than Orson Welles wrought two decades ago with his Martians. The time is 1963, a final war has been fought, some 4,000 cobalt bombs have been dropped, and the end of humanity has come in all but the extremities of the Southern Hemisphere. In Australia, the residents of Melbourne know that winds are inexorably bringing radiation sickness and death in a few months. At the last moment the Government will issue suicide ...

Though we are reading of the last days of humanity on an earth made uninhabitable by radioactivity, no one in ["On the Beach"] gets very excited about it. Mr. Shute quotes T. S. Eliot's dictum that the world will end not with a bang but a whimper, but the last people on earth do not even whimper as they await the approaching radioactive pall. Calmly, they face the inevitable, knowing with certainty that death is only three or six months away, yet planting daffodils to bloom next spring,...

The theme of Nevil Shute's [On the Beach] is dramatic and awe-inspiring: it is nothing less than the end of the world. Nor is his plot impossible, or even unlikely: the headlines of our daily papers proclaim it all too probable…. Despite its powerful theme, Nevil Shute's book is a very bad novel. The people in it are dull and unimaginative, and the ending is anti-climactic rather than apocalyptic. In fact, his characters are so flat and unappealing that you may well feel their final dea...

In 1939 Nevil Shute wrote a horrifyingly prophetic book, Ordeal, which made the life of the average citizen under bombardment only too real, as time proved…. And now comes Shute again [in On the Beach] with a portrait of the last stand of mankind against an enemy over which there was no control—radiation, gradually encompassing and destroying the world. There has been a brief atomic war, launched by two nations and resulting in mutual destruction within a brief month. But then the real catastr...

[The main premise of "On the Beach"] was made to order for Nevil Shute, who never tells the same story twice and who tells any story surpassingly well. The Shute formula is simple: Given such and such circumstances, what would people beset by those circumstances be most likely to do? That should be every novelist's formula, but a less assured practitioner frequently bends it to suit his own convenience. Not Nevil Shute. He holds to his design all the way, with relentless logic and a glo...

Nevil Shute is a journeyman fabulist; fantasy simulating reality is his preserve. A more gifted writer wouldn't be so successful visualizing men and women of a residual humanity, with no future and nothing to think about it. [On the Beach] is not prophesy but fictional essayism; it is not eschatology, it is Univac. The prophet concerns himself with the future while it is still present; Mr. Shute hires fate as his co-author and has a wry old time knocking down his props. We are not harrowed that they ...