A genre selection for the next book club meeting and I finished it in a night (I suspect that it was picked in part as an easy read, to set us up for finally tackling The Magus - which has, amusingly, been increasingly becoming to the book club what Proust is to me, its reading deferred over and over - the following month). I'm pretty sure that I've read some Wyndham in the past, probably back in primary school - The Day of the Triffids, Chocky, maybe The Chrysalids? I don't have clear memories of any that I did read, but a strongly lingering if diffuse sense of being distinctly unsettled by them remains with me. I have that same kind of sense-memory of The War of the Worlds, and I think that what that novel has in common with those of Wyndham (at least on the strength of Midwich) is the combination of a cool, detached authorial voice and an escalatingly monstrous devolution of the familiar in the face of an onslaught of the alien.
The Midwich Cuckoos was first published in 1957, post-WWII, Cold War at its height, and all haunted by the shadow of the Bomb, and I think that that context is significant - intriguingly, some aspects are practically spelled out by Wyndham himself (I'm thinking particularly of the collective nature of the Children and the threat that this is seen to pose, and the conversation that a couple of the characters have about the similar communitarian setup in communist Russia), we're left to guess just how much Wyndham intended of many of the other motifs (the figure of Zellaby being a key one, and particularly the manner in which he figures in the novel's closing). I also wonder how much of Wyndham's seeming preoccupation with Darwinism and the possibility of the human race being superseded by a rival species can be attributed to the various competing national and racial threats then so latterly thrust into British consciousness (the Germans with their bastardised-Nietzsche Übermenschen (is that the plural?), the irreducibly foreign Japanese with their alien value systems, the supposedly endless 'production line' of the Russian infantry, and perhaps not least the unquestionably ascendant Americans, rising as the old empire crumbled). And no doubt the barbarity of war can also be felt in the theme of the essentially contingent nature of civilisation when confronted with the old underlying struggle of nature, red in tooth and claw.
Anyway, taken at face value it's a good read, too - kept me up a lot later than I'd have liked last night, and moves quickly and elegantly from scene to scene, carefully building a creeping, insidious sense of horror without ever pushing too far or too hard. Has a journalistic air to it, and comes across very much more as a novel of story and ideas than one of character. 3.7/5, by jove.
