"The chances of anything coming from
Mars are a million to one, he said".
But still they come! Or at least they do, in fiction, since H.G.Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1898. It was, the blurb on my Penguin Classics cover proudly attests, "the first modern tale of
alien invasion" and, for that and many other reasons, it has been made and remade for film, theatre, television (and, of course, by Jeff Wayne as a musical opera) many many times.
With a
TADS walk set for March around Woking and Horsell Common, sites integral to the story, I felt it was time to revisit the book I first read about fifteen years ago. At the time the style of writing surprised me. It was very matter of fact. Almost as if in the manner of a police procedural. Incredibly dramatic things happen but the stoic delivery of the narrator renders them more prosaic than you'd expect.
Would a second reading prove this initial impression correct or had I missed something? Certainly, I'd not recalled Wells' way with a poetic turn of phrase. Night is "the mother of fear and mystery", loneliness and emptiness are described as "nothing but this gaunt quiet" and, best of all for me, "few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims". I've nicked that one for the title of my walk.
The opening sentence, "no one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water", sets out Wells' stall with both accuracy and precision in intent. There's very little fat on his writing.
Wells appears to have a love-hate relationship with
humanity. It seems he wants humans to be the best we can but despairs of our selfishness, our petty grievances, and the way we treat both each other and the other animals on our planet. In the decades following The War of the Worlds, H.G.Wells would go on to write lots of apparently lesser, more moralistic, books in an attempt to get us to improve ourselves. But the intention was already there in 1898. He just wrapped it up in some pretty juicy science-fiction.
In the first chapter alone Wells writes of man's "infinite complacency", their "little affairs", and their "petty concerns" and we later learn of men who are not taken seriously, when telling the truth, simply because they are not wearing hats, and observe that the incurious nature of most Brits means they continue to eat, drink, sleep, and do the gardening even as the
alien invasion has begun.
The Martians, however, are described as having "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" with "minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish" who see we men as "at least as lowly as are the monkeys and the lemurs are to us". He reminds us that this alien cruelty and disregard for life is merely a reflection of our own, of how humans have made not just "the vanished bison and the dodo" disappear but also made extinct entire human races like "The Tasmanians". Even on a more local scale, Wells never resists the opportunity to point out some of the baser behaviours of the human race. The rubberneckers on Horsell Common are booed and jeered by "thoughtless and excitable souls to whom a crowd is always an occasion for noise and horseplay" and, when the aliens first start killing, two women and a small boy are trampled to death in a stampede as people attempt to escape.
Wells was living in Woking at the time and the fact that he sets the initial scenes of the Martian invasion in his home town (as well as nearby Ottershaw, Leatherhead, and Chertsey - there's even a chapter called 'What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton') gives the story both a verisimilitude we can relate to and acts as a contrast between the mighty Martian pods and
the suburban roads and houses of Surrey.
There's also a feeling that Wells felt stifled by polite society and took great pleasure in imagining its total and utter destruction. A wake up call to all the
pompous, self-serving, little Englanders and commuters who represented the 9 to 5 existence that his adroit imagination and skillful writing had given him an escape route from.
The big city doesn't get off scot-free either. Far from it.
London just has to wait longer to be punished. The narrator's brother lives in
London where's he studying medicine and spending his evenings in music-halls.
London people, for the most part, seem unconcerned about the arrival of Martians in
Surrey (critics of
our capital would no doubt say that it is hardly atypical for a Londoner to be unconcerned about the regions) and, in some instances, are more interested in the hordes of people arriving in the west of the city from Molesey, Walton, and Weybridge. Many with their furniture loaded up into horse drawn carts.
To escape the alien invasion, of course. The commotion this causes commuters at Waterloo brings about a general ill temper that would not reach such a level again until South West Trains were given a franchise to operate from there in 1996. Elsewhere there is a kind of gallows humour as guns are brought up from Chatham and
Woolwich. "You'll get eaten" and "we're the beast-tamers" both being overheard examples.
The sheer power, and size, of the Martians is news that seems to reach
London slowly and incrementally but as it does the streets fill like 'Epsom High Street on Derby Day' and, of course, the taverns of
London are soon doing a roaring trade. The Martians themselves, of course, make a rather ruder debut in the city. Eight o'clock at night there is heavy firing heard south of
London, then the largest city the world had ever seen, and by the witching hour church bells are being rung, and policemen knocking doors, to awaken people from their slumber and advise them to seek refuge. Many head to
Chalk Farm station to board special trains bound for the North-West.
Not peaceably either. Revolvers are fired, people are stabbed, and police break the heads of people they have been instructed to direct. In Wells' words:- "
London, which had gone to bed on Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened in the small hours of Monday morning to a vivid sense of danger".
Kingston,
Richmond, and Wimbledon, word had it, had all been destroyed. Wells seems to take particular delight in the annihilation of the more fashionable districts and denizens of
the city and, it must be noted, takes no little pleasure in the damage that is dished out to St Paul's Cathedral. A physical manifestation of another underlying concept within the book, that of
the uselessness and cowardice of Christians and Christianity in the
face of a foe far greater than their incurious brains had been able to even imagine.
The alien invasion had begun with a "falling star" seen "rushing over
Winchester eastward" that many people in
Berkshire, Surrey, and
Middlesex would have seen and taken for an ordinary meteorite. All except Ogilvy the astronomer who found, near the sand-pits of Horsell Common, an enormous hole "made by the impact of the projectile" surrounded by burning heather and heaps of displaced sand and gravel.
A huge uncovered cylinder protruded from the earth and, eventually, it dawned on Ogilvy that the cylinder, or the Thing as Wells calls it, was being unscrewed from within. There was something, something or someone, alive inside of it. But when Ogilvy tried to assist in opening the cylinder the heat shock he received was so intense he ran back to Woking. It was so hot that another famous Woking visitor, HRH Prince Andrew, would have regained the ability to sweat.
When Ogilvy returns to the common with the journalist Henderson all is quiet and it is assumed the men from Mars are dead. Henderson telegraphs the news to his
London office and soon the morning newspapers are full of stories about the 'dead men from Mars'. It's not long before "a number of boys and unemployed men" are gathering at the common to sate their curiosity. Employed men, it is to be presumed, having far more pressing concerns than an alien invasion.
The crowd of onlookers grows exponentially larger and rowdier. The cylinder is unscrewed but what emerges is not a man. Not a little green man of the public imagination. The narrator is struck by a "sudden chill", "disgust and dread", and an "ungovernable terror" and the rest of the watching crowd utter "inarticulate exclamations" and even a "loud shriek" in "half-fascinated terror". Wells describes the first appearance on Earth of a Martian but, for the sake of spoilers and because our own imagination holds far darker terrors than even Wells can articulate, I shall not divulge.
When he describes how the Martians "slay" the humans and animals of Earth, Wells gets all scientific. He uses words like "non-conductivity" and talks of how the force of gravity on Earth is three times as strong as it is on Mars, how the percentage of argon and oxygen in each planet's atmosphere affects that, and there's even mention of "a polished parabolic mirror". Most of which I don't properly understand.
It all stands quite at odds with a world of Surrey villages, vicars, churches, orphanages, and country pubs. A juxtaposition even more pronounced upon the first sighting of giant tripods, "higher than many houses, striding over the young pine-trees, and smashing them aside". Wells ask us to imagine "a milking-stool tilted and bowed violently" squirting out "puffs of green smoke"
At times Wells' self-regard is almost astonishing. He writes that "so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. We can forgive him his vanity, however, because he is telling, mostly, the truth.
Not only was he one of the first to imagine an alien invasion but he was also writing, in 1898, essentially, about
climate change or at least how the cooling of the planet Mars seemed to presage extreme weather conditions on our own planet. Wells saw Earth, in the future, cooling and the ocean levels lowering. Of course, we know now it's the other way round. But, in intent and imagination, at least, he was on to something long before many others. Some still aren't there. Like Meatloaf. A man, it goes without saying, we've all been eager to hear from on this issue.
Wells imagined how extremes of temperature could harden hearts and result in radical, violent, solutions although when he suggests these conditions brightened intellects we can safely say he did not foresee the coming of
Trump.
The likes of
Trump have turned political movements into quasi-religions, debased opinions into articles of faith and wished a form of hell on the non-believers. Wells, I think, would not have been a fan. At least judging by the way he writes about religion and religious people. A curate we meet on the outskirts of Weybridge quotes the Book of Revelation, constantly repeats the mantra "fire, earthquake, death", and despairs that it is "the end. The great terrible day of the Lord". Wells, sensing that man's paucity of imagination is so pronounced that he can only visualise Earth being destroyed by omnipotent beings of man's own fabrication, has his narrator (who bears a striking similarity to a certain Herbert George Wells) respond with "what good is religion if it collapses under calamity?" and "do you think God has exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent".
Sometimes Wells' flights of fancy are simply magnificent. Following the narrator's first encounter with the Martians he is, a couple of glasses of wine to the good, convinced they will, if necessary, be easy to destroy. He looks back on himself and compares his complacency to "some respectable dodo in the Mauritius" who "might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed that arrival of the shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food" before imaging the dodo telling his avian spouse "we will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear". Later, Wells suggests that should a balloonist have looked down at the destroyed, and
blotted, settlements of Ealing, Richmond, and Wimbledon it would seem "as if some monstrous pen had flung ink upon the charts".
When he describes the aliens he ponders their integuments, their features, their problems to stand upright under Earth's denser atmosphere, their complete disinterest in sexual procreation, and their method of consumption as a curious doctor may note an anomalistic patient in his diary. He repulses at their alien behaviour, using pipettes to suck blood from living creatures, while at the same time bearing in mind "how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit".
Some, it seems, are less intelligent than others. While, at all times, we're left in no doubt that the narrator/author is a greater intellect and capable of more advanced thinking than other men, women fare even worse. Men rarely fear for their own lives, instead worrying how 'their' womenfolk will cope without them and the aforesaid curate, who irritates with vitiation and 'shifty cunning', is described as "as lacking in restraint as a silly woman". Different times, eh?
To return to that idea of the police procedural, great and important events are related as if a man should be telling you about the traffic or what day they come for the bins. A publican is found dead on the street, his neck broken, and Wells steps over him "gingerly" and informs the reader that this was a man whose "conveyance" he had previously taken.
There's no shock, no horror. Just matter of fact reportage and one has to wonder if this is how Wells would view, or even will, the destruction of huge swathes of the human race, a literary device employed for the book, or simply the pre-eminent style of the late Victorian era. Following the near complete destruction of
London, he simply notes "certain it is that many died at home".
This cold, steely, relating of events is probably not how an author of our times would go about telling this story. But should you scratch beneath the veneer you find that there is a warmth at the heart of The War of the Worlds and it's not just that provided by the deadly Martian heat rays. Wells takes pleasure in the fictional destruction of places we know and love but only, I think, because he's concerned that the complacency, selfishness, and vanity of man risks bringing about a very real destruction. The aliens aren't that different to us. They're just more advanced. They've developed weapons to kill us with faster and more easily but, it appears, they've not developed enough of a conscience to see that that may be wrong. Remember that next time you tread on an ant or vote in another warmonger.
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