‘The War of the Worlds’: Order Teeters on the Edge of Chaos

A review of ‘The War of the Worlds’, by H.G. Wells; Heinemann, 1898.

There is a moment early in The War of the Worlds when the narrator sees a big metallic cylinder unscrew itself on Horsell Common. The world has not yet grasped the horror of what is coming. A few onlookers gather, speculating. Within days, these same spectators will be trampled in a blind panic. England’s countryside will burn. And the very laws of civilisation will collapse like matchwood before an unthinking, unfeeling force.

The narrator who tells this story is a writer and philosopher of sorts. When a Martian cylinder crashes near his home, his quiet life near Woking, Surrey, is upended. At first, the beings who emerge from this and other tubes seem sluggish, even helpless. But soon their machines—vast, three-legged war engines—are striding across the land, using heat rays to incinerate all in their path. In no time at all the Martians take the cities. They obliterate the army. They spread a black, choking smoke which turns the air into a weapon. And humanity, so used to ruling over nature, becomes its prey.

At first, the beings who emerge from this and other tubes seem sluggish, even helpless. But soon their machines — vast, three-legged war engines — are striding across the land.

The narrator flees with his wife to Leatherhead but they are soon separated. Chaos spreads as refugees flee London. He meets a panicked soldier whose swagger and bravado crumbles into fearful rage, and a curate, whose religious fervour grows more intense as the world collapses. He hides in a ruined house, trapped for days as the Martians scavenge outside. Fear itself becomes perilous as breaking down or crying out in horror risks drawing the attention of the Martians.

The War of the Worlds is charged with horror, yet the Martians are not villains. They are not even all that malevolent. They act as humans would, and did, upon encountering a weaker race:

And before we judge them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

Wells wrote the book at the tail end of the 19th century, when the British Empire bestrode the world. In literature, invasion fantasies were beginning to surface: wildly jingoistic and flag-waving stories in which plucky Brits fought off the Germans, or the Russians, or the French. Wells flipped this idea on its head. His attackers are beings from Mars whose technology dwarfs anything human hands have built. If great technical superiority justifies rule and enslavement, Wells asks, then why are the Martians any different from the British, or any conquering force?

In literature, invasion fantasies were beginning to surface: wildly jingoistic and flag-waving stories in which plucky Brits fought off the Germans, or the Russians, or the French.

Faced with the Martians, the false security offered by institutions—the army, the government, the church—is made plain. The military is crushed; the politicians shown to be powerless; the priests transformed into quivering and half-mad wrecks. There is neither defence, nor order, nor consolation. All people can do is try to survive. And when they do, their real selves are revealed. They trample each other in their rush to escape. And the real horror of the book lies in its suggestion—the reality, in fact—that we are never safe, and for all our claims of culture we teeter in perpetuum on the edge of nature, in which our lives are—to take from Hobbes—‘nasty, brutish and short’.

Civilisation is frail. We are frail. This is Wells’s point. The War of the Worlds is not a tale of invasion, a ‘critique’ (as we have learned to say) of British imperialism. It is a mirror. We are not nearly as strong as we believe, he says: and the second we forget that, the moment we grow complacent, the instant we convince ourselves that we have it all worked out, the cylinder on the common, close to Woking, Surrey, begins to unscrew once more.