Midwich Revisited

A few months ago I mentioned my liking for the novels and short stories of John Wyndham, and have now at last got round to re-reading his ‘Midwich Cuckoos’, (made into a film rather melodramatically called ‘The Village of the Damned’ which I have yet to see – and later there was a remake which I don’t wish to see). This is  in many ways my favourite among his longer books. I can’t recall how long it is since I last read it, but I was struck this time by one wholly unexpected way in which it has dated. PLOT SPOILER WARNING – do not read on if you do not want to have the plot revealed.

 

This shows in the huge amount of the book which is devoted to the reaction of many of the women involved to the fact that they have become pregnant outside wedlock. Some are very young. One is pretty plainly meant to be half of a lesbian couple, though the word is never used.  All but the married are deeply embarrassed and ashamed of their condition. The local vicar, aided by the doctor, have to work very hard to persuade them (and the village) to accept that their condition, not being their fault, should not be a matter of shame.

 

And yet this story is set in what are, more or less, modern times – the post-1945 age of the welfare state, telephones, broadcasting, jet planes and nuclear weapons.

 

The central event of the book is the mysterious isolation of the village, in an invisible dome-shaped force-field in which all living terrestrial creatures instantly lose consciousness.  Aerial pictures, taken at great risk from a considerable height, reveal a large egg-shaped presence in the middle of the dull, uneventful village of Midwich.  After a short period, the force field vanishes, and the object vanishes with it (leaving nothing more than a slight depression in the grass). Not long afterwards, all the fertile woman in the village are found to be pregnant. The resulting babies are strangely beautiful and largely indistinguishable from each other (though some are girls and some boys) . they rapidly reveal that they have extraordinary pwers over the human mind, powers which enable them to compel their mothers (for instance) to bring them back to the village from far away and are later used for much more sinister and frightening purposes.

 

But before we can get on with the main part of the story, the village has to overcome the moral and cultural shock of this mass outbreak of illegitimacy. Many, many pages are devoted to this. One couple, on the verge of marriage, are hugely distressed by the event. The vicar plays a major part in dealing with it.  Now, roughly 60 years later, I think  this would be the least of the village’s problems. The authorities of those times are plausibly shown as seeking to suppress the strange news, and successfully doing so. That, also, would be impossible now.

 

I like the book partly because of its portrait of English middle-class village existence in the early 1950s, which reminds me agreeably of bits of my own childhood, a few years later,  on the edge of Dartmoor, where we had no visitations from aliens but where many of the attitudes and mannerisms were similar to those described by Wyndham. He likes (as I have mentioned once before) to begin in fairly ordinary places and activities, among intelligent middle-class people, and to lead the  reader gradually into terrifying speculations on what really holds our society together, and on what we really believe.

 

The book also impelled me to look up the truth about the actual Cuckoo. Like millions of people, I had grown up in the vague belief that this bird lays its eggs in the nests of others, where its monstrous offspring first turfs out the other eggs and chicks, and then demands that the bereaved mother of its victim feeds it until it grows big enough to fly away and perpetuate its nasty self.

 

I suddenly wondered if this was one of those legends, like the untrue belief that lemmings commit mass suicide ( see this http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp). But no, the story of the Cuckoo is perfectly true, and rather disturbing.

 

And the parallel in this case, of human cuckoos, is actively terrifying once the implications become clear. Without giving away too much, I should mention that the Midwich Colony is not the only such visitation on the planet. There are several. But wherever they take place in ‘primitive’ societies, the reaction of the local menfolk is simple and savage. The babies (and in some cases their mothers) are immediately slaughtered, and so never grow enough to exercise their powers. It is only in the advanced countries that the golden-eyed children are allowed to grow.

 

 

You will have to read it to find out how the ‘advanced’ societies deal with their Human Cuckoos.

 

This book, together with ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Kraken Wakes’, offers a cold-eyed exploration of what actually lies beneath our comfortable society, and of what nice, well-mannered professional middle-class people can do, when the old rules are suddenly cancelled. He is also good on the way in which people find the obvious very difficult to believe, when it conflicts with their prejudices and assumptions – and of the disadvantages, and advantages, of seeing clearly while others delude themselves. He also has a wonderful way of concocting plausible ways in which these great global melodramas begin - small-scale, credible and yet profoundly disturbing. He uses no tricks of language or form, just good, workmanlike prose.

 

I am always surprised that there is not more of a cult surrounding Wyndham (who was also fascinated by the possible outcome of feminism, and wrote intelligently and disturbingly about time-shifts in his short stories). He really rather deserves one. 

 

For those weho haven't yet been there, a visit to Midwich is recommended. I fear that, since Dr Beeching it is hard to get there by rail, but the buses still run from Trayne to Stouch and Oppley. Except on the (very) odd days when they mysteriously don't get there at all.