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A review by captainjaq
Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
4.0
Another in my continuing quest to catch up on the classics, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a short, quick book. The story is fairly straight forward – pods come down to Earth and replicate the humans of a small city near San Francisco. Miles Bennell is our hero, the guy who sees what’s going down and does his level best to a) figure it out and b) prevent it from happening to him. Additionally, there’s major secondary character called “Jack” who is a writer (a bit of self-insertion maybe?).
As the book progresses, and the pods continue their relentless destruction, Finney makes some assertions about what it means to be human, what the cost of the assimilation really is and how fighting it at all costs is the only reasonable option. What it’s not is the obvious “communist” metaphor the first film is accused of being. In fact, there’s a coda on the book, an interview with the son of the original film’s adaptor/director, about how he never purposefully created that metaphor, but that it was read into the finished film because of the time period. Later adaptations replaced the communist metaphor with others about the book’s dangers of blind assimilation message (there’s actually a really good essay about it by Kelley Crowley in The Fantastic Made Visible).
The only things which really bothered me was the ultimate defeat of the pods (not really a spoiler – a 1955 novel is going to have at least an upbeat ending if not absolutely positive). Not the way it was done in general, that was fine, but what happens with their final disposition and the way they were finally eliminated from Earth just didn’t seem plausible given what we’d learned about them earlier.
What I will say though, is that I’m really liking Jack Finny. About 6 months ago I read Time and Again and really enjoyed it, too. There will certainly be more of Finney on my “to read” list.
Full review here: https://captainjaq.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/review-kellers-fedora-and-others/
As the book progresses, and the pods continue their relentless destruction, Finney makes some assertions about what it means to be human, what the cost of the assimilation really is and how fighting it at all costs is the only reasonable option. What it’s not is the obvious “communist” metaphor the first film is accused of being. In fact, there’s a coda on the book, an interview with the son of the original film’s adaptor/director, about how he never purposefully created that metaphor, but that it was read into the finished film because of the time period. Later adaptations replaced the communist metaphor with others about the book’s dangers of blind assimilation message (there’s actually a really good essay about it by Kelley Crowley in The Fantastic Made Visible).
The only things which really bothered me was the ultimate defeat of the pods (not really a spoiler – a 1955 novel is going to have at least an upbeat ending if not absolutely positive). Not the way it was done in general, that was fine, but what happens with their final disposition and the way they were finally eliminated from Earth just didn’t seem plausible given what we’d learned about them earlier.
What I will say though, is that I’m really liking Jack Finny. About 6 months ago I read Time and Again and really enjoyed it, too. There will certainly be more of Finney on my “to read” list.
Full review here: https://captainjaq.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/review-kellers-fedora-and-others/