2015 read #71: The War in the Air by H. G. Wells.

The War in the Air by H. G. Wells
231 pages
Published 1908
Read from December 10 to December 11
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Many of Wells' early novels are remarkable in my memory for their dynamic openings. Take The Time Machine, his first novel: "The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us." The first three words are sufficient to form an irresistible hook. The Invisible Man is not so direct, but the mystery of the heavily-garbed "stranger" is developed -- and the hook is placed -- within the space of a page. The War of the Worlds, of course, is famous for the power of its opening lines: "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

The War in the Air, serialized some ten years after Worlds, comes at a point in his career during which Wells' interest in the didactic, allegorical possibilities of "scientific romances" had begun to crowd out his skill at telling a good story. It opens with a protracted caricature of middle class life in the suburbs of London, entire chapters (only two, but plural chapters all the same) of petty buffoonery and rendered dialect before much of anything happens to our central character, who is named (with some obviousness) Smallways. Wells goes to such pains to develop the petty-minded, provincial, incompletely "civilised" man of the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century because it supplies one of his central themes, spelled out in the depiction of Smallways as a representative of a society (or "civilisation," in Wells' Edwardian terminology) lagging behind morally and socially while its technology, and military technology in particular, raced ahead beyond all rational conception:

Great Britain spent upon army and navy money and capacity that, directed into the channels of physical culture and education would have made the British the aristocracy of the world. Her rulers could have kept the whole population learning and exercising up to the age of eighteen and made a broad-chested and intelligent man of every Bert Smallways in the islands, had they given the resources they spent in war material to the making of men. Instead of which they waggled flags at him until he was fourteen, incited him to cheer, and then turned him out of school to begin that [comically inept and disastrous] career of private enterprise we have compactly recorded. France achieved similar imbecilities; Germany was, if possible worse; Russia under the waste and stresses of militarism festered towards bankruptcy and decay. All Europe was producing big guns and countless swarms of little Smallways.

In short, Wells is spelling out the social and technological circumstances that would shortly lead to what proved to be the First World War. Wells' increasing bitterness in the respective prefaces to the 1921 and 1941 editions of The War in the Air climaxes with the curt despair of "Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: 'I told you so, you damned fools.' (The italics are mine.)"

Anyone watching the xenophobic mass delusions of our modern, Trump-cheering Smallways will realize how little progress our "civilisation" has made toward adapting to a complex, crowded world.

While rendering excellent service to Wells' overarching point, the characterization and depiction of Bert Smallways sets up tonal dissonance throughout the novel. Bumbling head-first into an absurd plot contrivance, and from thence carried passively through the horrors of airborne warfare and the complete collapse and dissolution of "scientific civilisation," the comic career of Smallways is at odds with the gravity and enormity of events around him. The narrator here is not a survivor mixed up in the action, but rather a detached future historian, forever shaking his head at the foibles and small thinking of the twentieth century. Gone is the tension and immediacy of The War of the Worlds, although certain plot beats -- Smallways is marooned at Niagara Falls while society begins its collapse all around the world, much like the unnamed narrator is trapped with the curate while the Martians solidify their grip on southern England -- are recycled nearly wholesale. Wells' prognostications are to the point, even today, but the story suffers from this detachment.

I will mention that (spoilers!) the sudden turn into a postapocalyptic narrative, barely two decades on from After London and already fully formed and recognizable to modern expectations, was surprising but welcome.