With the time left
Nevil Shute, of course, does not quote Miłosz, instead he used a poem by TS Eliot as the book’s motto. “And that’s how the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” He wrote The Last Shore in 1957, and the story takes place in 1963, the future from the author’s perspective that is not far away. A nuclear blitzkrieg has exploded in the northern hemisphere, great powers and small states have launched all their arsenal, nothing is left alive on our side of the globe. The earth is dying, along with humanity, and in a moment the rest of the animals and plants.
The heroes of Shute’s novels have a few more months to live; They are residents of the Melbourne area and the crew of an American submarine that managed to reach the south of Australia. They know that air masses soaked with radioactive dust are gradually shifting towards them, and they have calculated when to expect them. They predict with the accuracy of two weeks when the first cases of radiation sickness will occur. They monitor the collapse of more cities. It doesn’t take long for them, so they can work, play and devote themselves to their passions. After all, it’s summer, you have to take the girls out on boats, weed the garden, and deal with the cattle.
Destroyer of worlds
“It all gave the impression of noisy, unbridled carefree, more in the style of the last decade of the nineteenth century” … And for me – the interwar period, but not the one from Cabaret , but described in Fitzgerald’s novels. Anyway, you can hear it a bit in the language, style, or maybe just the tone of the Last Shore . Smart conversations, seemingly crazy parties, brandies and cigarettes. A love as delicate as a great friendship for ever. Hence my reference to Czuła is the night . In Polish, this comparison has a bottom line, the translation was created in 1968 by Zofia Kierszys. She gave us To Kill a Mockingbird, she translated Faulkner, Graves and Graham Green. This book allows you to touch the classics in a very clean condition, close to the original. After all, in Poland in the 1960s, people were also afraid of the impending world war, in which invisible but dispersed particles would wipe out life from the face of the Earth, as happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Last Shore can be quite a shock to readers brought up on American catastrophe and post-apo cinema. On the Road or Mad Max . And you know, two years ago I would have thought he was delightfully idealistic, full of faith in humanity, nothing to do with the discoveries of psychology (yes, Zimbardo). And yet … In 2020 I saw an attack on Biedronki for toilet paper, which calmed down as soon as it began. In our hipster cities, grassroots initiatives have been launched to support closed cafes and small shops. Thanks to them, in the world crisis, a smiling cyclist, probably a neighbor from the neighborhood, tosses bread from an artisan bakery at my door. Somehow I believe Shute …
Nevil Shute shows the beauty of the dying world, mono no aware . A beautiful melancholy in which the characters distill themselves. A world that suddenly slows down, because since we all know our dates of death, there is no point in pretending that we still want to fight for something and waste the last precious months. It is a post-apo that is a deep praise of life.
