"On the Beach" by Nevil Shute

 1963. There has been a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Everyone seems to be dead. A radioactive cloud is drifting south. Melbourne is the furthest south big city. The inhabitants are waiting to die. 

The story revolves around Australian Navy officer Peter Holmes, his wife and baby; US Submarine commander Dwight Towers, missing his presumably dead wife and children, consoled by wannabe girlfriend Moira; and scientific officer John Osborne. Each of them try to continue as if nothing is happening. Peter and his wife worry about the baby's health and make plans for their garden; Moira's father puts in fencing for his farm; Dwight buys presents for his (probably dead) wife and kids; John wants to win the very last grand prix race. Some people keep working, others get drunk.

A stunning, beautifully written study of human behaviour, and the quest for meaning in life, when faced with inevitability.

Of course, it is of its time. The women are fundamentally passive, seeking a life of housewifery and motherhood. Patriarchal attitudes are everywhere: "These bloody women, sheltered from realities, living in a sentimental dreamworld of their own. If they'd face up to things, they could help a man,help him enormously. While they clung to the dreamworld they were just a bloody millstone round his neck." (Ch 5). But the husband uses the excuse of work to leave her and go into town.

Selected quotes:

• "It's not the end of the world at all ... It's only the end of us. The world will gone on just the same, only we won't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us." (Ch 3)
• "You get scared stiff. Then directly it's over you want to go on and do it again." (Ch 7)

September 2022; 296 pages 

Shute also wrote, among many other books, A Town Like Alice

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Playing with Fire" by Tess Gerritsen

This thriller starts brilliantly. The protagonist, Julia, a second violinist, finds an unpublished waltz in a Rome junk shop run by "a little gnome of a man with eyebrows like snowy caterpillars." The shop is unnaturally cold and as she reads the music "the hairs suddenly rise on my arms". As she leaves the shop she notices "twin gargoyles perched above the pediment" and a "brass Medusa-head knocker". Spooky!

Back home in America she starts to play the music as her three year old daughter, Lily, plays with the cat. When the music has stopped she discovers that the cat has been stabbed with the garden fork that the daughter is holding. All this happens in the first eight pages and, if you aren't utterly hooked by now, you will be when Julia plays the music again and finds herself stabbed with broken glass. There is mental illness in her family (her mother killed her baby brother) and psychiatrists start testing Lily to see whether there is any reason for her to be doing this. Julia is starting to believe that it is the music that is causing the problems (it uses "devil's chords [which were ] ... considered evil and banned from church music" in the middle ages), perhaps supernaturally, and she starts an obsessive quest for the composer. Julia's husband Rob (he absolutely has to be an accountant so there can be instant and easy conflict between a numbers type and an arty type) is worried by this obsession, convinced of his daughter's sanity (shades here of We Need to Talk About Kevin) and, suspecting that Julia herself might be imagining the attacks, wants to send her to a mental hospital.

This is gripping stuff.

And then we suddenly break from this thrilling tale to go to Venice in 1936 where Jewish violinist Lorenzo is practising for a duet with Laura Balboni, falling in love as the fascist storm clouds gather. Lorenzo is, of course, the author of the music. This is a sweet interlude, with menacing overtones, but the change of pace is so sudden. I was racing along scherzo furioso and suddenly we switch to adagio dolcissimo.

It never really regains the intensity of those first few chapters. We switch back to Julia and thriller mode as she travels to Venice to find the answers and out of the blue she is being shot at by hoodlums and there appears to be a conspiracy against her. Classic thriller territory. Which, given the excitement and the potential of the start, was actually a little bit disappointing.

August 2016; 314 pages