The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

It's hard to believe I'd never read this before, but H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is so pervasive in our culture that it seems intimately familiar even if you've never opened the cover of the book.

This is a tale told through the agency of a first person narrator who remains nameless. (I know a thing or two about this approach, since it's exactly the one I take with my own Vinyl Detective novels.) Indeed, most of the characters in this book are nameless, being defined instead by their job — the servant, the artilleryman, the curate, etc.

Wells is highly visual writer. And highly effective. Here is the second Martian ship landing: "a star fell from heaven into the pine woods to the northwest. It had a greenish colour, and caused a silent brightness like summer lightning."

And as the Martians burn a village they send a "smoky red flame leaping up above the houses... against the hot, blue sky." 

One of the really striking things about the book is the complacent normality of the humans — everybody going about their business as if nothing is wrong — which precedes the big Martian attack. Wells brilliantly achieves a contrast between the strangeness and savagery of the alien invasion with the peace and normality it disturbs.

Strangeness and savagery indeed. Wells describes the Martian heat ray as "this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat." And the troops approaching the Martians are "simply swept out of existence." Then the alien invaders attack human populations with their black smoke — a lethal gas —  “as men might smoke out a wasps’ nest.”

This is an accomplished and surprising novel — surprising because it focuses as much on the repercussions of the Martian invasion as on the invaders themselves. Most of the book, and certainly the most powerful scenes, concern the chaos and panic and flood of refugees caused by the advance of the Martians, long before the Martians themselves arrive on the scene.
 
(The 2005 Spielberg movie version, scripted by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, was distinctive because it emphasised this aspect of Wells' book.)

The collapse of social order here is horrific and striking: "the police... were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect ... my brother... had the luck to be foremost in the sack of a cycle shop."

Incidentally, the brother who loots the bicycle is an inspired device. By giving his narrator in the countryside this sibling in London, Wells neatly doubles his narrative possibilities and expands his locations.

Which brings us to another of the novel's great strengths, setting each horrific vignette of the invasion in an authentic locale — the use of real place names adds immeasurably to the impact: "the burning country towards Chobham... Regent's Canal, a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation... By midday a Martian had been seen at Barnes." (I live near Barnes!)

It's amazing how quickly civilization falls apart, with looting everywhere and ruthless profiteers ferrying refugees across the English Channel — for a steep price. Victorian readers must have been scandalised at this (no doubt accurate) forecast of what would happen in such a situation.

The Martians' progress is relentless, terrifying, an unstoppable advance — and they just keep on landing reinforcements. In this, and many other respects, the book is engrossingly and vividly and powerfully written.

It's 90 pages before some soldiers finally — and very briefly — score a hit with their artillery against the invaders.  "The shell burst clean in the face of the Thing. The hood bulged, flashed, was whirled off in a dozen tattered fragments of red flesh and glittering metal ... The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant." 

This sequence provides a tremendous emotional release for the reader after all the endless defeats and atrocities inflicted by the Martians on us humans. But it's short lived... fighting the invaders with our weapons is like "bows and arrows against the lightning," as the artilleryman remarks, bleakly and accurately.

In case you're not familiar with this brilliant novel, I won't give away the ultimate secret of the Martian's defeat.

But I will mention the savage satisfaction I felt about reading about the fallen Martians being eaten by dogs and birds — "the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs had left... shreds of brown, at which the hungry birds pecked and tore."

Even after the invasion has been stopped and the last invader is dead, the Martians continue to exert a threat, though. The attempts by human scientists to learn the secrets of their weapons results in "the terrible disasters at the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories." 

This is a fabulous and frightening book.

(Image credits: The wonderful Edward Gorey cover is from my own library. If you're looking for a copy to read I'd highly recommend this handsome, strikingly illustrated pocket-sized hardcover edition published by New York Review Books. All the other images are from Good Reads where I found a greater choice of covers than I've ever seen for any other book. I've hardly scratched the surface of this treasure hoard with my selection here. I particularly like the vintage 1954 Pocket Book with its George Pal movie cover and the wildly irrelevant H.R. Giger-style sexy Greek one.)