Also, 'On the beach'

Also managed to lay my hands on 'On the beach' by Nevil Shute. The storyline is interesting: a war in the Northern hemisphere turns nuclear and snowballs into a full blown nuclear holocaust, wiping out the whole of the populace of the Northern Hemisphere. The winds are carrying the nuclear dust down South and it is only a manner of months before the last few folks in Melbourne also die an inevitable death. The book is set in Melbourne and tracks those last few months. The book was written at the height of the cold war when the scenario proposed by the book may have sounded too close to potential fulfilment for comfort.

The style is still the same distinctive one that you would encounter in 'A town like Alice' but overall, I thought the book was average. The best part of the book was that it introduced me to an interesting poem by T S Eliot called 'The hollow men'. The book starts with a quote from the poem (which can be read here: http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/). The poem is also a dark judgement on the 'hollow' intellects of the architects of the cold war. The ending (which is the bit quoted in this novel) goes like this:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

...which is the essential theme of this book by Shute. It is worth reading just for the matter-of-fact starkness of the narrative.