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ohnomoresnow 's review for:
The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
The tripods. The suffix “From Mars”. The climactic, anticlimactic climax. Orson Welles. Prog rock. Tom Cruise. The War of the Worlds is one of the few common science fictional touchstones of the late 19th/early 20th century to stand comfortably shoulder to shoulder with more fantastical contemporaries like Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula. Like those archetypes, ‘Worlds no longer has much to do with the literary work that spawned the phenomenon. Your neighbour and her neighbour and everybody’s neighbour have their own discrete version of those striding metallic invaders from outer space in their heads, and if those versions have something in common with each other and with the book, most likely it’s the imagery.
The imagery is what had stayed with me through the years - I think I first read ‘Worlds in my mid-teens - red weeds, relentless Martian war machines, lone men wandering through desolate Victorian suburbia. When I started reading the book again, I also recognised the feeling associated with that latter image as something I’d carried with me without realising it. Perhaps it could be best described as an awestruck loneliness. On this second read, that feeling turned out to be much more important to me than the refresher course in where all those tropes came from. Because, like both Stoker and Shelley’s books, ‘Worlds deserves its place in the Hall of Fame on literary merit alone, cultural significance be damned. It’s my own damn fault that the work’s staggering quality came as such a surprise. I suppose I’d let Steven Spielberg not only superimpose his own pet themes over the original’s in his movie, but in my memories as well. No, I didn’t really expect to read a sappy family drama when I first cracked the spine, but I was still bowled over by Wells’ versatile and nimble touch, his gentleman narrator’s detached first person reportage giving way in flashes to sheer (survival) horror, breathless action or kitchensink existentialism; seamlessly, unobtrusively.
It’s that structural choice which allows Wells to do so much, I think. His narrator’s restraint allows for some beautiful understatement. Even if Wells doesn’t shy away from the graphic detail or detailed descriptions, his most horrific passages or turns of phrase are those that leave everything to the imagination. Not only is this a vote of confidence for the reader, these variations also double as character beats. What the narrator chooses to tell and not to tell, what he chooses to detail and what he chooses to rush past. He in no way regards himself as an infallible hero, but Wells also allows the narrator moments of unselfconscious arrogance or fear. The paragraph in which he examines himself and his guilt (or lack thereof) in the aftermath of a horrible transgression is one of the most ambiguous - and strongest - passages in the book.
For prospective adapters, Wells’ observations of humans and humanity in crisis should be the most important thing to retain and transcribe. Even if it is hard for the extraterrestrial elements to provoke the same sense of wonder after over a century of pop culture dissemination, it’s still possible to feel some of the work’s initial impact, precisely because of that naked humanity and - surprisingly - the geographical specificity. One would think the exhaustive recitations of names and geographical descriptions would be alienating to someone not from London, but that’s precisely why it works. Most of us know just as many street names and place names from our own immediate vicinities, and that specificity is recognisable in itself, as a coping mechanism, as security, as a (universal) measure of scale. We don’t all live in metropolises, but as the invaders arrive, move and destroy their way through the narrator’s painstakingly detailed home (because that’s what all those square miles of detail conveys to the reader; not some unknowable, faraway place, but simply, home) those country roads, caved-in cottages and block after block blotted out by black smoke, become all too familiar, regardless if you’ve ever put foot in Surrey or not.
Perhaps there’s a lesson somewhere in here for all the writers struggling to make their characters and settings relatable and universal. The more Wells’ narrator tries to pull away and present his story in a measured and cool fashion, the more human he seems. The less we see of the individual stories as they are swallowed up in a faceless torrent of panicked human flesh, the more affected we are by them. For every specific detail we see of a foreign place where we’ve never been, the more it seems like home.
The imagery is what had stayed with me through the years - I think I first read ‘Worlds in my mid-teens - red weeds, relentless Martian war machines, lone men wandering through desolate Victorian suburbia. When I started reading the book again, I also recognised the feeling associated with that latter image as something I’d carried with me without realising it. Perhaps it could be best described as an awestruck loneliness. On this second read, that feeling turned out to be much more important to me than the refresher course in where all those tropes came from. Because, like both Stoker and Shelley’s books, ‘Worlds deserves its place in the Hall of Fame on literary merit alone, cultural significance be damned. It’s my own damn fault that the work’s staggering quality came as such a surprise. I suppose I’d let Steven Spielberg not only superimpose his own pet themes over the original’s in his movie, but in my memories as well. No, I didn’t really expect to read a sappy family drama when I first cracked the spine, but I was still bowled over by Wells’ versatile and nimble touch, his gentleman narrator’s detached first person reportage giving way in flashes to sheer (survival) horror, breathless action or kitchensink existentialism; seamlessly, unobtrusively.
It’s that structural choice which allows Wells to do so much, I think. His narrator’s restraint allows for some beautiful understatement. Even if Wells doesn’t shy away from the graphic detail or detailed descriptions, his most horrific passages or turns of phrase are those that leave everything to the imagination. Not only is this a vote of confidence for the reader, these variations also double as character beats. What the narrator chooses to tell and not to tell, what he chooses to detail and what he chooses to rush past. He in no way regards himself as an infallible hero, but Wells also allows the narrator moments of unselfconscious arrogance or fear. The paragraph in which he examines himself and his guilt (or lack thereof) in the aftermath of a horrible transgression is one of the most ambiguous - and strongest - passages in the book.
For prospective adapters, Wells’ observations of humans and humanity in crisis should be the most important thing to retain and transcribe. Even if it is hard for the extraterrestrial elements to provoke the same sense of wonder after over a century of pop culture dissemination, it’s still possible to feel some of the work’s initial impact, precisely because of that naked humanity and - surprisingly - the geographical specificity. One would think the exhaustive recitations of names and geographical descriptions would be alienating to someone not from London, but that’s precisely why it works. Most of us know just as many street names and place names from our own immediate vicinities, and that specificity is recognisable in itself, as a coping mechanism, as security, as a (universal) measure of scale. We don’t all live in metropolises, but as the invaders arrive, move and destroy their way through the narrator’s painstakingly detailed home (because that’s what all those square miles of detail conveys to the reader; not some unknowable, faraway place, but simply, home) those country roads, caved-in cottages and block after block blotted out by black smoke, become all too familiar, regardless if you’ve ever put foot in Surrey or not.
Perhaps there’s a lesson somewhere in here for all the writers struggling to make their characters and settings relatable and universal. The more Wells’ narrator tries to pull away and present his story in a measured and cool fashion, the more human he seems. The less we see of the individual stories as they are swallowed up in a faceless torrent of panicked human flesh, the more affected we are by them. For every specific detail we see of a foreign place where we’ve never been, the more it seems like home.