The War of the Worlds, Day 2: I Wish He'd Named the Narrator

Okay, so I am waaaay late in posting this. Well, maybe not way late. Two days late, anyway, which I like to think of as being pretty unheard-of for me. My plans are all thrown off and stuff.


Why?


Because, frankly, this book is boring.


Seriously. It's only 180 pages long, no more than a novella, really, and yet it took me a while to get through it because... well, like I said, it's boring. Martians are destroying the world (er... well... Martians are destroying England) (in actual fact, Martians are destroying London), and they're massacring the human race (that is, that part of the human race which lives in London). It's exciting and awful and horrifying. In theory. In reality, I kept getting bogged down in it.


Alright, I know I'm leaping out of the gate here with a great flurry of complaining. Let me backtrack slightly and attempt to compose a somewhat more intelligent and reasonable sort of review/response.


In my last post, I said that I have yet to find a Science Fiction book I like. There are a number of reasons for this. Here's one: I read books for the characters.


Naturally that isn't the only reason I read books, but if I don't care about the characters in a book, chances are good I won't like the book. I like unique characters. I like meaningful character development. I love watching the relationships and interactions between characters evolve and unfold. This is probably one of the reasons, perhaps even the main reason, why I like Jane Austen and other nineteenth-century authors so well; their books are primarily, sometimes even entirely, character-driven. Little to no plot, maybe some sort of moral or social commentary, but generally nothing too heavy-handed, mostly just interesting, varied, well-written characters going about their lives.


From what my limited reading experience and my wider observations have told me, this is basically the opposite of Science Fiction.


Now, before anybody gets all offended, I know there are character-driven Sci-Fi books, and I'm not saying that all Sci-Fi books are populated by one-dimensional or uninteresting characters. But it seems to me that Science Fiction tends to be focused on one or both of two main elements: scientific innovation and speculation or political and/or social commentary and satire. It's all technological imaginativeness and cautionary storytelling, often heavily plot-driven and loaded with debate and morally challenging concepts - and all this sometimes comes at the cost of character. I've had trouble getting into Science Fiction, because I've had trouble finding characters whose lives and fates I can be invested in.


So maybe I'm being a silly emotional girl, unreasonably demanding that stories be about people in whom I can be interested. I know there are tons of people who find that the science and the technology and the politics and the moral quandaries amount to more than enough reason to read a book, and just as many people who can't stand my beloved Austen and Bronte and Dickens books because not enough happens in them. To each their own. I am what I am, I know what I like, and I'll admit to getting a little pettish and whiny when a book doesn't have what I like.


And honestly, The War of the Worlds might very well be the least character-focused book I have ever read.


The fact that this book was adapted into a radio play which consisted of nothing but an announcer delivering news bulletins about the Martians' progress should tell you how much the characters in this book matter. There's a nameless narrator who spends the whole book wandering around having so many near-death experiences it starts to test the limits of suspension of disbelief and looking at Martians; he has a nameless wife who appears in the very beginning and the very end of the book; he has a nameless brother who disappears halfway through and is never mentioned again; there's a nameless artilleryman whose only purpose in the narrative seems to be to give the narrator someone to talk to, so that the book can have some dialogue; and there's a nameless curate whose purpose seems to be enabling H. G. Wells to make fun of religious people. And... that's basically it. The rest of the book is essentially just a straightforward description of the Martians' doings. Honestly, the Martians don't even show up that much. Most of the book is just the narrator wandering around various towns looking at ruined buildings and dead bodies. A high point was the absolutely thrilling (note: sarcasm) five-page-long action scene in which the narrator's brother attempts to cross a street.


According to some notes in the back of the book, the prolonged descriptions of ruined towns that the narrator aimlessly meanders through actually added to the eeriness for initial readers. See, unlike a lot of authors of his time, Wells used names and descriptions of actual places. All the action occurs in and around London. The references to geography are constant. Every time the narrator or his brother or a Martian moves an inch, he lets you know which direction he's facing and which town he's heading toward. So someone living the region in question at the time of the book's publication would, in reading it, have the unsettling ability to determine exactly where the Martians landed and every place that they went. They might encounter a description of the town they lived in in ruins, littered with corpses. It'd be creepy. It'd stick in your memory. I get that.      


The problem is, to an American who's never been to England, sentences like, "The seven proceeded to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved line between St. George's Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, south-west of Ripley" mean nothing. It's just a lot of words, and it's hard to get through.


So here's what Wells did well: he did a great job imagining (and describing) (in GREAT detail) the widespread panic and destruction that would result from an alien invasion. In the Martians, he created a reasonably believable and well-designed alien race, clearly putting a lot of thought into how Mars's makeup and atmosphere would affect the evolution of its inhabitants. The science he's basing his descriptions on is, of course, very outdated now, but he operated well with what he had. He also seems to have predicted the laser, which is kind of neat.


But again, the widespread panic and destruction and the Martians' terrifying technology and unfeeling slaughter of humanity is all fairly unaffecting, because I don't care about anybody. If every character in the book had died and the Martians had won, I would've been fine with it, because I would've had no reason to be saddened by the deaths of Nameless Narrator, Nameless Wife, Nameless Brother, or Nameless Artilleryman. (Spoilers - Nameless Curate actually does die. And I couldn't care less.)


And that, at long last (yeesh, this is getting to be a long post) brings me to my final problem with the book. Man wins. The Martians are defeated and we're left to dissect them and their machinery and thus achieve grand scientific advances and a vast influx of new knowledge. Humanity prevails. Yay us.


I won't spoil how this comes about. But basically, the alien race which is miles beyond us in intelligence and technological capability, the aliens which have invented space travel and got all the way from Mars to the Earth in a matter of weeks, maybe even days, are laid low by the world's most convenient deus ex machina.


And not only is this pretty implausible, even for a book about Martians invading the Earth (or, rather, invading London) (actually, that's another thing that bothered me; why, with the whole entire Earth just sitting there asking to be invaded, did all the Martian ships land around London? For that matter, how did they do that? The ships take off from Mars at twenty-four-hour intervals. The Earth would've been moving in between takeoffs and the Martians' transport ships don't seem to have steering, so the Martians' aim would've had to have been insanely good for them to get all the ships to approximately the same place. But I'm getting off-topic), it also confuses Wells's token social commentary.


Throughout the book, Wells regularly compares the Martian invasion to other colonial invasions throughout history. He talks about dodo birds and human populations of colonized islands being hunted to extinction, and says that to the Martians, this is the same scenario; a superior species dealing with a pesky inferior one. So how do we feel now that we're the dumb animals? There seems to be a fairly strong criticism of British colonialism being built - a criticism which is then completely overthrown by his ending conclusion that natural selection has declared that Man and only Man can rule the Earth, and by his assertion that the Martians' coming ultimately benefits humanity more than harms it, through the aforementioned scientific advances and influx of knowledge.


It's bizarre, and it's a mixed message, and it makes all his comments about previous colonizations seem as pointless as his characters.


So in conclusion, I still have yet to find a Science Fiction book that I like. But hey - there're still five more to go.


~Pearl Clayton