A review by chrysemys
On the Beach by Nevil Shute

5.0

I found it refreshing that in a story about the end of the world, the population of a doomed city have mostly declined to succumb to panic and violence. Instead, they seem to be dealing with the situation with an attitude that is part pride, part cheerful fatalism, and a shitload of denial. A kind of "We're all going to die but we're not dead yet and we're planning for a future in which we won't be dead in a matter of months." Cognitive dissonance may be the healthiest way to meet such an end. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a dozen years from publishing On Death and Dying when On the Beach came out but Shute seems to have some intuition of the process a person goes through while reckoning with his own impending death. Maybe it is too huge to grasp that civilization--indeed, most animal life on the planet--will not survive and that is why everyone is stuck in denial for so long. Shute has a truly interesting take on this hypothetical situation and I don't know why it hasn't appeared in more works of fiction--it is kind of surreal.

I didn't love the 1950s sexism although Shute did include a more or less independent/free spirit type female character along with the childlike, hysterical wife who is either further in denial than everyone else or is too helpless and innocent to understand the situation.