Everybody lies

This is one of those books I had on my wishlist for a long time, ever since I developed a taste for dystopian fiction. I understand this story is one of the classics of the genre, written in the “paranoid fifties” when everyone was afraid of the world being blown up by a nuclear war. It’s strange that today we don’t waste a thought on that possibility anymore - the bombs are still there after all. Probably we have so many other things to worry about nowadays that we just don’t have time for worries about this anymore. Or we just got used to the threat.

However, in the fifties people apparently worried a great deal, judging by the staggering number of novels dealing with this topic. And since I am working on building my very own library of dystopian fiction, I had to read this one, too.

The plot is easily told: There has been an accidental nuclear war and most people in the world are dead (yeah, I know, not the most auspicious start to a story). The only ones still alive are the Australians, because this war took place in the northern hemisphere and the radioactivity will take a couple of months to drift southwards and kill them, too. Interestingly, the australian government chose to tell the people the truth and so everybody knows that they all will have to die soon and there is nothing anybody can do to change that fact. They even have an approximate date for it. The whole book is about the different ways people try to deal with this knowledge.

So far, so good. It does sound like it would be gut-wrenching to read this? That’s what I thought, too, before I started it. Unfortunately, I am either too cynic and hard-hearted, or else the story really is too simplistic and unrealistic. The concept had so much promise as a study of human behaviour in an exceptional situation, but the execution fell far short of my expectations.

Since the book is more than 50 years old, you obviously have to make some concessions as to how people talk and generally behave (women have to stay home, take care of the children and have to be looked after by their menfolk, because they are absolutely unable to manage on their own *retch*). But even so, I thought many of the characters behaved completely unbelievable. Especially one of the women drove me up the wall with her complete repression of the fact that she and her baby and everybody else would die a horrible death in a couple of months. Of course, nobody likes to dwell on such facts, but she was just unbearably stupid and annoying and if I had been her husband, I would have bashed her head in long before the radiation would have become a problem. This general sense of “the guys are heroically coping, whereas the women are having breakdowns or are suffering from denial or delusions” really ticked me off anyway. I kept reminding myself that the book was written 50 years ago in a very different time, and for all I know Shute could have been looked at as a very progressiv guy in his day, but it made me want to throw the damn thing against the wall every couple of pages.

But it being dated is not my only quibble with the book. Even if you account for those differences in society, most of the story seems incredible (in the sense of it being not realistic). Human nature as such hasn’t changed all that much since the fifties. Could you imagine the uproar, the mayhem, the panic that would ensue, if your government told you that you all would die very soon with no chance of help? Society would utterly break down in a matter of days, if not hours. Nobody would go to work anymore, people would hoard food, there would be break-ins into every store, crime rates would go through the roof, because nobody cared about tomorrow anymore.

Does any of this happen in Shute’s story? Au contraire. Everything goes on as it has before, except for a few people who go a bit overboard with the drink (no brawling, though!). Otherwise it’s business as usual, more or less. People go to work, people go shopping, people make plans for the future. Only in the very last days do you not have to pay in stores anymore (yay!), do the trains not run quite on time anymore, do people stock up on suicide pills. And finally they even bring forward the date of the last big car race somewhat, because some people finally catch on to the realization that the usual date might be a tad too late for anybody to still be alive. How unrealistic is all that? Come on, people may have been a bit more well-behaved and tame back then, but these people in the book are zombies already. None of their reactions ring true.

And don’t even get me started on the abysmally horrid dialogue! Jeez, I refuse to believe that anybody ever talked as stilted and unnaturally as this. How hard can it be as an author to read the dialogue you have just written aloud and hear if it sounds even marginally the way people actually talk? Judging by the “quality” of his dialogue, I would have to resume that Nevil Shute had to have been deaf and had never in his life heard somebody talk…

Also, even though I am a bit fuzzy on the science of nuclear explosions, I really have difficulties believing that it would take months for deadly radiation levels to spread all around the world. If it’s spreading quite that far at all, I would expect it to move a lot faster and less predictably than that. But then again, what did they know about this in the fifties? Probably a lot less than I know today. Nevertheless, wondering about the scientific reality kept distracting me.

All in all, this book was quite a disappointment. The idea had so much potential, but the resulting story is weak, boring and not in the least believable. As one Amazon reviewer put it: “Mr. Shute had a wonderful scenario for the end of the world in this book. Now if only he had given the idea to an author who actually knew how to write.”