The Midwich Cuckoos (Ballantine Classic, 02763)

Surprisingly dull.

The central idea of a group of telepathic and psychopathic alien children being raised in a sleepy English village while they prepare to replace humanity is great fun, the thought of all those forced pregnancies is genuinely horrifying, and the downbeat end is effective, but...

The framing is really clumsy. The story is narrated by someone who is only loosely involved, has no agency and no real character of his own. His opening line tells you that he and his wife weren’t badly affected by what happens, there are several missing years while he’s off working in Canada during which time interesting things should have been happening, and lots of events are described to him after the fact by other people; all of which robs the whole thing of any tension or excitement.

The most interesting people to follow in this story would have been the women and the children but instead of that we are subjected to page after page of old men sitting around talking a lot and doing nothing.

All very disappointing.

The white-haired, golden-eyed, alien children of Midwich, with the murderous ability to compel humans to kill themselves and each other, are the stars of this story. They share the bill with the quintessentially English setting of the village where they are spawned.

Another Wyndham regular, the thoughtful visionary, appears here in the form of Gordon Zellaby, an eccentric retiree who is the only one thinking far enough ahead to stop of the strange events at Midwich from destroying humanity.

Unfortunately Zellaby, unlike the triffid survivalist Coker or the heretical chrysalids' uncle Axel, is a bit of a bore. His waffly pontifications slow the story down. Adding to this, a lot of the action happens through second-hand accounts, as the narrator doesn't witness the key events himself.

The children begin by exploiting their surrogate parents' natural instinct to nurture them, only to turn on their hosts with plans of world domination. This reflects a natural phobia people might have felt in the 20th century, as a succession of terrifying new ideas emerged from the febrile minds of young visionaries. After all, Hitler was somebody's baby once. It's the flip side of the usual trope, that children are the hope of the future.

The decade after this book appeared, it would be the youth feeling the terror of an older generation bringing nuclear brinkmanship, and forcing young people to fight cruel and meaningless wars on their behalf. Maybe that's why Wyndham's output pretty much stopped once the 60s came around. He just wasn't made for those times.

Wyndham's take on evolutionary competition is also brutal and absolutist: it's them or us, kill or be killed, red in tooth and claw. It's a bleak interpretation of inter-species relations, and not consistent with the totality of Darwinian science.

The story's pacing and the misunderstanding of evolutionary basics are not huge problems for me. The sheer originality and even beauty of this novel shine through more brightly. It is one of Wyndham's three masterpieces, although "The Day of the Triffids" and "The Chrysalids" are superior.