It's not that I've cheated on it: these fingertips have touched no other fiction in the meantime. It's not that I've ignored it, either: despite my exponentially escalating workload as a student teacher, I have read a little bit of it almost every night. No, the trouble (and the reason why I've eked the damn thing out in such tortuously tiny increments) is that I didn't like it.
I am a bit embarrassed to admit this.
The War of the Worlds is a seminal novel. Published 113 years ago, it was the first modern tale of alien invasion. Think of all those that have come after, novels and films alike: It Came From Outer Space, The Day of the Triffids, The Thing, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Independence Day, Men in Black . . . The list could go on, and on, and on, and on. The War of the Worlds popularised invasion fiction, paving the way for endless reimaginings of our planet's interactions with alien lifeforms.
It starts off promisingly enough. We follow the story of a man who, in his amateur astronomical observations, notices a strange jet of flame emitted from the planet Mars. Days later, a shooting star is observed falling towards earth - and lands in Horsell Common, near our narrator, who ambles along to see what gives. There he finds a cylinder in the middle of a vast crater, the top of which is unscrewed from within to reveal a slimy, tentacled Martian. Spectators gather round the lip of the crater, only to be vanquished at the first green flash of the aliens' Heat Ray.
Cue mass exodus, jumbled up with death and destruction and foolish sceptics who don't believe there is anything to run from. The Martians, severely hampered in their movements by the Earth's superior gravitational pull, haul themselves into their 'handling machines' - lithe, three-legged constructions of gleaming metal - and go on a bit of a rampage. Our narrator takes his wife to safety in Leatherhead, and leaves her to return a borrowed dogcart to his local innkeeper. The Martians, however, get in the way, and so begins a mad dash through London and north, scavenging for food, and picking up waifs and strays along the way.
This was the point at which I began to lose interest - mainly, I think, because of Wells' insistence on geographical precision. The avalanche of place names in this book is frankly stifling, and if you don't know London and its many suburbs in intimate detail (and I don't) then it frustrates the reading experience. It didn't help that the narration of the book holds the reader continually at arm's length. From very early on in the novel, it becomes clear that the narrator is telling his story from some point in the future at which the Martians have been vanquished. As you might imagine, this does defuse the tension rather. There is also a heavy reliance on exposition; a tendency to report rather than dramatise. For example, at one point in the novel our narrator is hiding out in a farmhouse with a curate, when a Martian rocket lands right outside the house. The narrator and the curate aren't getting on very well anyway, and now they are trapped together indefinitely. The narrator tells us of the curate:
"As the days wore on, his utter carelessness of any consideration so intensified our distress and danger that I had, much as I loathed doing it, to resort to threats, and at last to blows. That brought him to reason for a time. But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anaemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves."
Somehow I would rather have seen those days play out on the page, to have observed the fights and to have drawn my own conclusions about the character of the curate. This is a big fat instance of Telling not Showing, and while I do believe that there is a place for Telling in all writing, I got a bit cheesed off with being Told all the way through the course of this book.
Ultimately, I found I didn't care too much about my narrator's personal journey. He'd already told me that the Martians were going to come to a sticky end, I knew that he would survive, and I was fairly confident that he would end up reunited with his wife as well. Yawn yawn.
What did pique my interest, however, was the way in which news of the invasion spread. In late nineteenth century London, there are no telephones, no text messages, no radio. When something momentous happens, it spreads by word of mouth, by telegram, and by newspapers still wet with printing ink hawked on the street. Mass communication is a process of diffusion; news can only permeate through a population person by person. The slowness of it, the fallibility of it, is something that is almost unimaginable in the current Western world, with our iPhones and our broadband connections and our plethora of national and international information networks.
Communication has progressed beyond recognition since my own childhood, let alone since Wells' time. As for how it may develop over the next 113 years . . . that, surely, is for the writers of science fiction to speculate.
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