Are there many people who haven’t seen one of the many adaptations of H.G. Wells’ book War of the Worlds? When I was a kid I saw the old black and white movie version on some Saturday afternoon TV program that ran old movies. I also knew about the Orson Welles’ radio adaptation that scared the pants off quite a few people when it aired because they had missed the beginning and thought it was real. And then of course there is the movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension in which it is discovered that Welles’ radio play was not fiction, but that aliens had indeed landed and have been living among us. And even if you have never seen a movie version you still probably know the plot:
Martians invade. Kill a lot of people. Humans are helpless against them. Things look grim. But then the Martians catch the flu or the common cold or some other earthly bug and they all keel over. Humanity wins!
While the book is definitely a fun, and short, Victorian page-turner, there are still some interesting things that go on in it. Humanity doesn’t have the ability to fight back. Our weapons are pretty much useless against the Martians and their heat-ray and black clouds that kill instantly. And at one point the narrator has an epiphany:
For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.
But while he feels beaten down he is still determined to survive. He spends time with a curate who goes increasingly insane wondering what sins humanity had committed to deserve such wrath from God. Our narrator ends up aiding in the curate’s death by Martian and only feels mildly guilty about it because he had done it in order to save his own life.
Our narrator also spends time with an artilleryman who has escaped death and who goes on and on about how the two of them will put together a rebel group of humans who will live underground and survive while all the people who are “useless and cumbersome and mischievous” can just die. Our narrator goes along for a little while until he realizes that the artilleryman is as nutty as the curate.
When the Martians finally die, the epiphany goes out the window. Suddenly humans deserved to live because we had been fighting a war already for all those hundreds of years against the bacteria that killed the Martians. Humans deserved to live because
By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
And then our narrator imagines the human race going out into space and conquering new worlds!
The one thing that bothered me about the book is that the narrator dumps his wife at the cousin’s in Leatherhead and then spends the rest of the book without her. Oh, he insists that he is trying to get to Leatherhead but each time he says that he ends up going in the opposite direction and eventually ends up in London where he still is when the Martians die and where he still insists that he is trying to get to Leatherhead. His wife survives. He goes to their house near Woking and she shows up looking to see if he is still alive. We are then supposed to believe that he is really happy to see her. Right.
Overall though, a very fun book I enjoyed quite a lot.
Why anyone would make it a goal to get to Leatherhead is a bit of an enigma. If he had left the wife somewhere pleasant – Devon, say, or Bath, then maybe he’d have hurried back?
Whenever anyone mentions War of the Worlds, I instantly get ‘Forever Autumn’ by Justin Hayward playing in my mind. My brother had the album when I was a child, and the picture on the front of the Martians invading just devastated me. I can see it in my mind’s eye still. I wish someone had told me they all died of the common cold – I’d have been far less alarmed if I’d known that!
Litlove, heh, maybe that’s why he left her in Leatherhead, so he wouldn’t feel like he had to hurry back?
Pretty funny how images and songs like that from our childhood stick with us. If only you had known the Martians were defeated! According to Wikipedia there is a staute of a Martian in Woking which is where the invasion begins. I suppose that’s the town’s only claim to fame? I wonder how many tourist photos have been taken there 
My most recent memory of watching an adaptation of it is Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, Steven Spielberg’s production. But I don’t remember all the details you’ve outlined here in the movie. Just remember a lot of giant robots and Fanning’s screams. But the Orson Welles’ radio broadcast has got to be the most real.
Arti, you know, I don’t think I’ve seen any of the adaptations since the black and white one. Or actually, I think now that it might have been in color but had that colorized look to it. Heh, yeah, I imagine with Tom Cruise the female lead would have to scream a lot so he could rescue her and look manly
Do you know I have never seen any of the film adapatations or heard the radio play (which would be fun to listen to), though I knew more or less what happens in the story. Who would have thought we’d be grateful for the common cold? This sounds like fun–even though he leaves his wife behind (maybe it needs to be retold–a modern version where the wife leave the husband behind!
).
Danielle, never? Consider indulging sometime especially in the old original. I would love to see an updated version where the husband gets left behind!
One amazing thing about this book is how it has been so imitated for so long. Thousands of books and movies whose theme is an alien invasion of Earth have just been derivatives of this story. The way that the Martians meet their end, oddly enough still seems fresh and original. The much more common conclusion to these stories, that of aliens being beaten in a military battle, pales in comparison to Wells’ idea.