This is not a review, and I don't hand out stars either. It is part of my annotated reading list. Whatever first comes to mind when I pick up the book. More about it in this blog post. The English text is a translation made with an LLM, which I check and revise myself.
written on November 15, 2026, read 2012
I spent a while thinking about what the fiftieth book on this list should be. I already have an idea for the hundredth: a book that sweeps me along anew every time I read it. Cheers me up. Inspires me.
At some point it occurred to me that the fiftieth book should be the exact opposite. A book that drags me down. Depresses me. It comes from that corner of the shelf where the books stand that you rarely read again, because you’re rarely in a state to bear them. It’s “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute.
The following text will contain a lot of spoilers, but I think that’s fine for a book published in 1957 and first filmed in 1959. Anyone who hasn’t at least seen that film should stop reading now. Just this much: the “gut punch” scene is worth it. You’ll know which one I mean when you watch the film. Make sure it’s the 1959 version, with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and a young Anthony Perkins.
The book rests on a pretty bleak premise. A devastating nuclear war has been fought in the northern hemisphere, and life there no longer seems possible. Australia is initially unaffected, but the southern hemisphere is increasingly being contaminated too. An American nuclear submarine has survived the war and is placed under the command of the Australian armed forces. In addition, strange, largely meaningless radio signals are being received from the United States. The submarine is sent out to discover where they’re coming from. Throughout the entire mission, the radioactive cloud keeps moving and eventually reaches Australia, too. In the end, it turns out that the radiation over there is still lethal – and that there’s a thoroughly mundane reason for the mysterious radio signals.
Humanity has no chance in this book. And it knows it. The end is inevitable. The “villain” of this book isn’t a world order that led to war. That’s more or less just the backdrop. The antagonist is a cloud. All through the book, you follow it as it creeps ever closer.
I was fairly young when I first saw the film. It shook me badly. All the way through, I had hoped it would have a happy ending. Until the scene with the window blind and the Coke bottle, which, moved by the wind, kept tapping a telegraph key standing next to them. The signals that had led the submarine all the way to America were nothing but a stupid accident. And the scenes with the band, ever smaller and ever more out of tune, playing beneath the banner “There is still time … brother”, were pretty crushing. I have no idea why I put myself through such heavy fare at such a young age.
I wasn’t alone in being shaken. Later I came across the film again: it plays an important role in Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears”. In Clancy’s novel, the world is sliding towards nuclear escalation. At one point, Jack Ryan falls asleep in his office and dreams of this film – with his own family in it. That’s enough to make him try once more to stand in the way of escalation.
Years later, I bought the book. I think it was after I had seen the 2000 remake. Because it felt different in many places, I wanted to know what was actually in the book. And I found that the old film was much closer to it.
How do you deal with an inescapable end? Almost all the characters react with a good measure of something I long took for denial. They plan gardens they’ll never see bloom and buy presents for relatives who are probably long dead. They’re all aware that the invisible monster is lurking just around the corner, and conversations often drift in that direction. And yet they all react with remarkable stoicism. Almost as if they had adopted the motto of Mark Rylance’s Rudolf Abel in “Bridge of Spies”. Asked whether he isn’t worried, he simply replies: “Would it help?” The characters in the book could ask the same question.
But perhaps it’s something entirely different from denial. Anyone who doesn’t think “What’s the point anyway” and sit on their hands isn’t surrendering to doom. They keep shaping things – as human beings. It isn’t the result that counts, but the deed. After all, those who began building Cologne Cathedral didn’t live to see it finished either.
The ending of the film doesn’t quite do justice to the book. True, in the film, too, the captain doesn’t stay with Moira in the end – which at least gives the film one up on the remake. But there, it’s because his crew wants to go home. In the book, it’s because he considers it his duty to scuttle the boat. That’s an even darker ending. It doesn’t matter what he does. Soon there won’t be any humanity left. And yet he clings to his duty. An uncomfortable ending. I can understand why they didn’t want Gregory Peck to leave the film quite so unsympathetically.
I’m more inclined towards Schmidt’s understanding of duty: humanity towards others is a duty. And he failed to fulfil that duty towards Moira. This weighs all the more heavily because the Australian liaison officer had offered to follow in a tug to take his crew (and him too) off the boat shortly before it was scuttled. Which duty do you choose?
Of course, it could be that he would have seen dying together with Moira as a betrayal of his late wife back in the US. If he couldn’t be with her in her final moments, how could he allow himself to be with Moira? But that interpretation was probably too ambivalent to spell out in a film with so many 1950s Hollywood stars.
And yet the film’s solution may even be the better one: the crew wants to go home, even though that home no longer exists. In this way, Towers commits himself to humanity towards the people under his command. And not just to rules and norms that soon no one will be left to enforce.
And how would you react yourself? Would you choose Moira? Not an easy question when you put yourself in Captain Towers’ shoes.
For many years, we pushed the scenario in which this book is set out of our minds. Swift annihilation seemed far away. Its place was taken by the slow kind: the destruction of the foundations of our lives. But looking at political developments, the old spectre seems to be venturing out of hiding again. Unfortunately, that makes the book topical once more.
Take the book out of the end-of-the-world corner, and you can also read it as an allegory of one’s own end. There are people who, in the face of their own decline and approaching end, still burn themselves up so that others can stay warm. There are people who slide into self-destructive behaviour. And there are people who start things whose outcome they won’t live to see. Here, too, the question is how you yourself will react when that time comes. The only difference: for us, the world keeps turning afterwards. It’s only your own world that ends. And the band, growing ever smaller and playing ever more out of tune, is your own life.
It’s a story that has never let go of me. And when I think of the book, I think in black and white.
PS: To this day, I’m not quite sure what to make of the remake, a two-part TV film. In German, it’s called “USS Charleston – Die letzte Hoffnung der Menschheit” (“USS Charleston – Humanity’s Last Hope”). German titles can be truly awful sometimes. I think it’s a betrayal of the story that Captain Towers and Moira take the suicide pill together at the end. A betrayal of the captain’s character. Even though I would have wished for a more humane Towers: a Towers who stays with Moira would be a different person – and it would be a more comfortable story.