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A review by peebee
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
4.0
Making two protagonists be whitebread naval officers with the exact same personality, and jumping from one to the other with a random aside instead of a chapter break, or even a line break between paragraphs made it impossible to recall who'd said what to whom and/or who did what at what time, except as in the cases where either of the women (ditzy housewife or wild party flapper, in true 1960's fashion) in either guy's life was involved in the scene. It didn't really matter anyway as the four of them are almost never out of each other's hair, and mostly reacted to external events all at the same time and place, so it rarely led to confusion with the actual motion of the plot.
Otherwise, it takes the buildup to what would be the macguffin salvation climax in any dumbass book or movie made nowadays and lets the air completely out of it, around the halfway point of the book. And the rest is just people coping with the inevitable hopelessness afterwards. No one has any agency except how they choose to die.
Maybe a bit too little agency. They mention the southern hemisphere had 2 years to prepare for the eventual deposition of fallout with a halflife of 5 years. Seems like you could have perhaps built some sort of bunker in that time, with food enough for 5-10 years for a couple dozen people, but that would make it a different book.
Only for like half a page in the whole thing does he indulge in the 'We shoulda done something, shoulda said something when we had the chance!' That every entry in the genre spends half its time wallowing in, usually.
Otherwise, it takes the buildup to what would be the macguffin salvation climax in any dumbass book or movie made nowadays and lets the air completely out of it, around the halfway point of the book. And the rest is just people coping with the inevitable hopelessness afterwards. No one has any agency except how they choose to die.
Maybe a bit too little agency. They mention the southern hemisphere had 2 years to prepare for the eventual deposition of fallout with a halflife of 5 years. Seems like you could have perhaps built some sort of bunker in that time, with food enough for 5-10 years for a couple dozen people, but that would make it a different book.
Only for like half a page in the whole thing does he indulge in the 'We shoulda done something, shoulda said something when we had the chance!' That every entry in the genre spends half its time wallowing in, usually.