I Found the Time,,,

...to curl up with a good book. I don't often get a chance for that, but it's something I love to do. It was one I hadn't read before, and it definitely wasn't happy, but I also couldn't put it down. Since those are things I look for in a book (especially the first and last), I was in reading heaven.

The book was Nevil Shute's On the Beach, about the world post-atomic apocalypse. It was written in 1957, and parts of it are definitely dated, but the story itself has held up well.

It set in Melbourne, Australia, at the beginning of 1963, just about a year and half after the nuclear holocaust has wiped out the northern hemisphere. The war wasn't planned, grew out of a local conflict in the Middle East, and some of the bombing was done by accident, because no one knew exactly what was going on. In many ways, it would fit right into the modern world. We learn these details later in the book, as the characters talk about them amongst themselves, trying to make sense of what has happened, and what will happen.

What will happen is this: the wind pattern is following a normal shift, and carrying the radioactive dust and fallout into the southern hemisphere. There is no way to stop it, and no way to survive it. Everyone in the book will die, of radiation sickness, by the end of August. It's Australia, so that makes it the last winter, and the last springtime, and then goodbye. Radiation sickenss is a nasty way to go, so the Australian government made cyanide suicide pills available through pharmacies. None of this is hidden in the book; Shute doesn't play us that way. Rather, he writes about people's reactions, desires, and eccentricities in the face of absolute doom.

And in that sense, the book grips you. You read of the American submarine captain, who has convinced himself that come September, he'll go back home to his wife and kids in Mystic, Connecticut, and the Aussie girl who falls for him, and the Mary, the young wife who won't face what's happening, and her pragmatic husband, Peter, the naval officer who wants to be productive more than anything else, and John Osborne, the scientist who buys a racing Ferrari and gets out on the motor circuit... These people are like us. They have desires and hopes and dreasms, about home or the garden, or winning the Grand Prix, and suddenly they have to face the loss of those dreams, and everything else.

So what do poeple do? I won't tell everything. I will tell you that I couldn't put the book down, and I actually cried at the end. And that's a good read, to me.