Hi, Mark, playing a little catch up on my blog reading. I really enjoy your reviews and literary analysis. "On The Beach" sounds like an interesting read. I keep thinking of how the characters in Australia waiting for the end could be an analogy with our current world situation: climate change and other existential threats such as war in the Ukraine. Not to be bleak, but it's like, in a sense, all of us are those characters in Australia, waiting for the end. Well, not exactly waiting, thank God. The end is not determined and we keep doing what we can to make the world a better place. Thanks for your clear prose and insight as usual. Your journey and work are inspiring.
Thanks Mike. I suppose if Shute were writing On The Beach today he would find a way to make it about climate change rather than nuclear war. (Difficult, I suppose, because it would be hard to create such a compressed timeline.) But I think there is a very interesting relationship between the existential threats, which every generation seems to see around them, and how we face the prospect of our individual deaths.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that some time in the middle ages the Pope attempted to outlaw the crossbow on the grounds that it was such a deadly weapon that it threatened to wipe out all humanity. Not sure if that is true, but I find it easy to believe. I think apocalyptic fear is something we use to distract us from the immanence of our individual deaths.
Some people have criticized Shute's portrayal of the effects of nuclear war, arguing that it would not actually wipe out all of humanity. But to me that is missing the point. As I read it, On the Beach is a book about how we face death individually. The war and the radiation cloud serve to make all his characters face it together, though each, in the end, still dies alone.
Hi, Mark, playing a little catch up on my blog reading. I really enjoy your reviews and literary analysis. "On The Beach" sounds like an interesting read. I keep thinking of how the characters in Australia waiting for the end could be an analogy with our current world situation: climate change and other existential threats such as war in the Ukraine. Not to be bleak, but it's like, in a sense, all of us are those characters in Australia, waiting for the end. Well, not exactly waiting, thank God. The end is not determined and we keep doing what we can to make the world a better place. Thanks for your clear prose and insight as usual. Your journey and work are inspiring.
Thanks Mike. I suppose if Shute were writing On The Beach today he would find a way to make it about climate change rather than nuclear war. (Difficult, I suppose, because it would be hard to create such a compressed timeline.) But I think there is a very interesting relationship between the existential threats, which every generation seems to see around them, and how we face the prospect of our individual deaths.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that some time in the middle ages the Pope attempted to outlaw the crossbow on the grounds that it was such a deadly weapon that it threatened to wipe out all humanity. Not sure if that is true, but I find it easy to believe. I think apocalyptic fear is something we use to distract us from the immanence of our individual deaths.
Some people have criticized Shute's portrayal of the effects of nuclear war, arguing that it would not actually wipe out all of humanity. But to me that is missing the point. As I read it, On the Beach is a book about how we face death individually. The war and the radiation cloud serve to make all his characters face it together, though each, in the end, still dies alone.