Nevil Shute’s novel, On The Beach, begins in Australia on December 27, 196—, which is already sometime after nuclear war has eradicated humanity from the Northern Hemisphere. The novel ends the following year, sometime in late August or early September, when the fallout finally arrives on the southernmost-inhabited continent and kills off the only human beings who have remained alive on the planet.

Despite its terrifying subject of the end of humankind, the novel is a quiet one. There are no explosions, no last minute revelations, and no riots. The knowledge that the upcoming spring will carry radiation in its breezes has little effect on their daily lives, and many people live their final months ignoring their imminent death: professionals continue to go to the office, farmers continue to mend fences, and young women continue to fall in love. When the fallout reaches Australia, most people choose to end their lives at the first sign of radiation sickness rather than allow the pain to drag on to its inevitable end. In short, On The Beach is an illustration of T.S. Eliot’s famous line (also the novel’s epigraph), “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

In a novel where the subject is the end of humanity and where the dramatic action is focused not on the events causing that end, but rather, on events caused by that end—that is, where the end of the novel is a foregone conclusion at the beginning and the intervening pages are but a literary rendition of humanity’s graceful exit—it becomes a practical question as to how much of the novel should be given over to the exposition of back-story. In a book about the end of history, how much capital must first be spent on creating that history? To be more precise, how important is it for the reader to know the details of the nuclear war, and how important is it for the reader to become familiar with the history of the characters’ lives, especially since the future for every character is hopeless?

Before those questions can be answered, it is necessary to develop a working definition of back-story. In Phillips and Huntley’s Dramatica theory of storytelling, which holds that “every complete story is a model of the mind’s problem-solving process,” back-story is “a description of how a Main Character’s justification built up over time, leading him to intersect with the story’s problem, or how a story problem developed over time, leading it to intersect with the Main Character.” In John Dorf’s Playwriting 101, back-story is defined as the “experiences of a main character taking place prior to the main action, which contribute to character motivations and reactions.” The first definition describes a trajectory of intersecting forces (the main character and the story problem), while the second extends the single line of the main character back beyond the start of the story’s main action. Both definitions will be used in this paper, the first to describe the back-story of the nuclear war and the second to describe the back-story of the main characters.

As noted above, the novel begins sometime after war in the Northern Hemisphere has ended, not by virtue of one of nation defeating its enemies but by virtue of the nuclear annihilation of all participants. Shute sketches the back-story of this war throughout the first chapter. The first mention of the war comes on the third page of the novel, in the middle of a paragraph already focused on the back-story of two of the main characters:

They had been married in 1961 six months before the war, before he sailed in H.M.A.S. Anzac for what they thought would be indefinite separation. The short bewildering war had followed, the war of which no history had been written or ever would be written now, that had flared all around the Northern Hemisphere and had died away with the last seismic record of the explosion on the thirty-seventh day. (3)

Several pages later, in the guise of another character’s back-story, Shute describes the origins of the nuclear war:

He learned for the first time of the Russian-Chinese war that had flared up out of the Russian-NATO war, that had in turn been born of the Israeli-Arab war, initiated by Albania. He learned of the use of cobalt bombs by both the Russians and the Chinese; that news came deviously from Australia, relayed from Kenya. (10)

It’s not until the end of the first chapter that Shute tells his reader that despite “no one in the Southern Hemisphere ever dropp[ing] a bomb, a hydrogen bomb or a cobalt bomb or any other sort of bomb” (36), sooner or later, due to the way the winds work (35), everyone left on the planet is soon going to be killed by the war’s radioactive fallout.

The second chapter passes without any further details on what happened during the war. It spends most of its energy describing life as it is now for most Australians and for the main characters. But in the third chapter, Shute provides almost all of what can be known about the war:

The seismic records show about four thousand seven hundred [bombs were dropped]. … Probably most of them…big ones—fusion bombs, hydrogen bombs, or whatever you call them. … All the bombs dropped in the Russian-Chinese war were hydrogen bombs…most of them with a cobalt element. … It was all tied up with the warm water ports. Russia hasn’t got a port that doesn’t freeze in the winter … This guy from Intelligence said that what Russia really wanted was Shanghai. … There was another thing he told us. … China had three times the population of Russia, all desperately overcrowded in their country. Russia, next door, had millions and million of square miles of land she didn’t use at all because she didn’t have the people to populate it. This guy said that as the Chinese industries increased over the last twenty years, Russia got to be afraid of an attack by China. She’d have been a great deal happier if there had been two hundred million fewer Chinese, and she wanted Shanghai. And that adds up to radiological warfare…. (74-75)

The Russians never bombed Washington. … The very first attack. They were Russian long-range bombers…but they were Egyptian manned. They flew from Cairo. … They only found out it was Egyptian after we’d bombed Leningrad and Odessa and the nuclear establishments at Kharkov, Kuibyshev, and Molotov. Things must have happened kind of quick that day. … The first one was the bomb on Naples. That was the Albanians, of course. Then there was the bomb on Tel Aviv. Nobody knows who dropped that one. … Then the British and the Americans intervened and made the demonstration flight over Cairo. Next day the Egyptians sent out all serviceable bombers that they’d got, six to Washington and seven to London. One got through to Washington, and two to London. After that there weren’t any American or British statesmen left alive. … Decisions had to be made by the military commanders at dispersal in the field, and they had to be made quick before another lot of bombs arrived. Things were very strained with Russia, after the Albanian bomb, and these aircraft were identified as Russian … Someone had to make a decision, of course, and make it in a matter of minutes. … They think now that he made it wrong. … It’s mighty difficult to stop a war when all the statesmen have been killed. It just didn’t stop, till all the bombs were gone and all the aircraft were unserviceable. And by that time, of course, they’d gone too far. (77-79)

After that, there are no more details to be had. All who experienced the war firsthand had been killed, and the radioactivity makes it impossible for survivors to venture into the northern continents to conduct any type of postmortem investigation. Shute never even deigns to explain why Albania attacked Naples in the first place, perhaps because, in the end, it doesn’t matter: Once the bombs were built, it was only a matter of time before some country decided to use them, consequences be damned.

The nuclear war is the story problem that intersects with the lives of the main characters, of which there are four. The first two, Peter and Mary Holmes, are a young married couple with a newborn. Shute establishes this fact before the end of the novel’s first paragraph. Beyond mentioning that they got married six months before the outbreak of the war, Shute does not provide their back-stories—there is no mention of where they grew up, how they met, or any of the adventures their courtship must have held—but nor does his reader require one, since all the reader needs to know about Peter and Mary is that they are married, that they have a newborn, and that like everyone else, they are going to die.

The third main character, Dwight Towers, is a different situation. Shute introduces Towers with a three-page explanation of how the American submarine captain came to be under the command of the Australian navy (9-11), but it’s not until after Dwight meets the fourth main character, Moira Davidson, that the reader comes to understand that Dwight lost his wife, Sharon, and two children, Junior and Helen, in the war.

Since much of the action of the novel is Moira’s courtship of Dwight, this back-story lives up to Dorf’s definition by motivating and shaping Dwight’s reaction to the Australian woman’s advances; specifically, it justifies both his warmth toward and his ultimate refusal of Moira. When Dwight and Moira finally kiss after an extended courtship (on her part), it’s not because he loves her in the way she deserves to be loved, but because he is grateful for the way she eases his pain during what should have been the most difficult time of his life. Moira never suggests to Dwight that he forget his wife and move on, nor does she ever belittle his belief that, when the radiation finally arrives, it will only be to take him home to his wife and children. They kiss after she promises to help him find the perfect present for his daughter:

In the alcove he took her in his arms and kissed her. “That’s for the promise,” he said softly, “and for everything else. Sharon wouldn’t mind me doing this. It’s from both of us.” (159)

As with Peter and Mary Holmes, Moira Davidson also receives very little back-story. She is introduced to the reader as a fun girl who Peter and Mary call to help Dwight take his mind off what he’s lost:

“The thing is, we’ll have to find him plenty to do. Keep him occupied all the time. Never a dull moment. … I believe Moira Davidson would come and help us out,” she said thoughtfully. “If she isn’t doing anything else.”
“If she isn’t drunk,” he observed.
“She’s not like that all the time,” his wife replied, “She’d keep the party lively anyway.”
“…Never a dull moment.” He paused, thoughtful. “In bed or out of it.”
“She doesn’t, you know. It’s all on the surface.”
He grinned. “Have it your way.” (21-22)

As the novel progresses, Shute reveals that Moira comes from a farming family, and that her reaction to the looming tragedy has been to get drunk—“By the way, I’ve given up gin. … Rots your insides. I’ve been having them each morning, so I’ve given it away. It’s brandy now” (23)—and party as often as possible—“I can keep it up as long as I’ve got to, and that’s not so long now. I mean, why waste time in sleeping?” (23-24).

Moira’s journey throughout the novel is to gradually accept her fate as maturely as Dwight has. To witness this reversal, the reader requires nothing further from her back-story than what Shute provides: Before, Moira drank away her pain, then she meets Dwight and he shows her how to face reality with grace.

It should be noted that the while the American is the only character who receives a back-story of any weight, he is also the only character who the war has already affected. Though his Australian friends will no doubt be affected by the end of the novel, at the very beginning, Dwight has already lost most of what gives his life meaning. Not only has the war claimed his wife and children, but it has taken from him the very country he calls home. When the reader meets Dwight, the story problem has already cut its devastating arc through his life. It is Peter and Mary and Moira who it still has in its sights.

The sparseness of the characters’ back-story contrasts with the details that Shute provides concerning the nuclear war. Where he only gives his reader enough about the characters to make their actions believable, there is no structural need for Shute to develop the picture of the war. Beyond the fact of the radiation, it serves no function in the story, except perhaps the function of satisfying the reader’s curiosity or the author’s attempt to make a political statement. While the former is perhaps justifiable, the latter seems to be contradicted by a scene in which the American naval captain is turned-off by an exhibition of religious paintings:

They were all oil paintings, mostly in a modernistic style. … They paused before the prizewinner, the sorrowing Christ on a background of the destruction of a great city. … He said, “I hate it like hell…To me it’s just phony.” … He paused. “Too dramatic.” … They turned from the exhibition. “Are you interested in paintings?” she asked. “Or are they just a bore?” “They’re not a bore,” he said. “I like them when they’re full of color and don’t try to teach you anything…” (151-152)

The American’s taste in painting can serve as a guide to Shute’s own aesthetic motivation in crafting this quiet novel, and it explains why, when choosing to write about the dangers inherent in the use of nuclear weapons, he does not write from the center of the battle, nor does he write from the perspective of the world-stage; instead, he focuses his reader’s eye on the loss of the innocent and the mundane.

But the question stands: why does Shute provide more about the war than is absolutely necessary? The needs of his story are satisfied in the details he reveals in first chapter; the details from the third chapter serve no narrative purpose. Again, perhaps it is only to satisfy the curiosity that Shute expects in his reader, but if so, is that reason enough?

For satisfied readers, it may very well be. Satisfied readers do not care if a narrative contains structurally-gratuitous elements, provided those elements add vitality to the story and are not so substantial as to add significant weight to the reader’s burden. As Shute himself notes, “One must concentrate on the present and forget the past” (26).