Genre: Dystopia, Disaster
Narrative Style: First person
Rating: 4/5
Published: 1953
Format: Paperback
Synopsis: The first sign that anything is amiss is when strange globes start to appear over the sea and then sink under the waves. Nobody thinks anything of it at first but then ships start to disappear and worse, islands start to be attacked. Mike Watson and his wife, Phyllis are caught in the reporting of the events as they quickly escalate.
Unlike a lot of disaster style fiction, this novel takes you through events as they happen rather than what happens afterwards. At the beginning, Mike and Phyllis Watson are watching icebergs flow past them. Clearly something has gone very wrong. They decide that an account needs to be written of what has brought the world to this sorry state.
There are three separate stages to events. The first is the seemingly harmless phenomenon of strange red balls in the sky that seem to disappear under the waves. Next ships start to disappear and attempts at discovering what may be beneath the waves end with ships being destroyed along with strange creatures starting to invade islands and coasts. When people start to fight back and the creatures are curtailed then the icebergs start to mysteriously melt and the flood waters start to rise.
Mike and Phyllis are journalists and this is apparent in the report that Mike writes. There is a distance between them and events – with them often reporting back about events that they have not actually seen. Consequently the reader is a little distanced from it as well. There was little in the way of emotional response from Mike even when he describes having to get away from it all because he is stressed by events.
Wyndham allows Mike to comment on world affairs and reactions and this is much more successful. The comments about Russian and American reactions and about Government propaganda were apt and clever. The character of Bocker, who in the beginning prophesies doom, goes through many stages in the book – starting off being ostracised until finally he is the only one who has actually got anything right. This shows how the media works to create heroes and villains when it suits them.
I found the ending a bit disappointing. Perhaps because it seemed a bit too neat. It reminded me a little of my disappointment at the end of H G Wells The War of the Worlds. It was almost like a cheat. Or like Wyndham had got fed up with telling the story. Apart from that, this was a very enjoyable and very clever tale of disaster and the way that Governments respond to them.
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I think that’s a fairly common flaw in Wyndham – he’s far more interested in the apocalypse than the post-apocalypse (The Chrysalids arguably excepted, although this too ends at the brink of a new world) so there’s either an open ending or some hand-waving. I can’t help it – I love his work anyway. I like the way he challenges the nature of appropriate responses, and captures a sense of nostalgia for what’s lost. A lot of apocalypse fiction ends up focused so heavily on dehumanisation and struggle for survival – the only other author I’ve read recently who captures Wyndham’s sense of loss for an imperfect world was Emily St John Mandel.