The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham ~ 1957. This edition: Penguin, 1971. Paperback. ISBN: 140014403. 220 pages.
Lutescent.
Isn’t that a great word? I hardly ever run into it in fiction reading, though it’s a relatively common descriptor in botany and entomology. “Of a yellowish colour” is the nuts and bolts definition, but in practice it is generally used to describe an overall golden glow, a tint rather than a deeper dye.
The children – perhaps that should be in quotations? – with whom this science fiction – horror? – novel are concerned are definitely lutescent, what with their glossily sheened skin and their beautiful golden eyes. (Though Wyndham might not actually use the term; I thought he did but I can’t find it on reexamination of the pertinent bits of text.)
Almost inhumanly beautiful, they are, which encompasses the whole point of this morally wrought tale. They’re not human. So, when it appears that the existence of the golden ones may threaten the existence of humankind-as-we-know-it, do all the normal rules of civilized behaviours apply?
That is the Big Question.
Let me back up.
Here’s the story.
Strange events in the peaceful English village of Midwich!
Within a defined circle of countryside, with Midwich roughly at the centre, at 10:17 P.M. on a mild-though-damp September evening, everything goes to sleep. Insects, birds, farm animals, and most definitely the humans. They drop where they stand, frozen in a sort of catatonic trance. (The lucky ones are caught indoors or in bed; some of the people out in the elements – well – not so good.)
The first edition dust jacket depicts a clever idea dreamt up by some of the army people to define the edge of the Sleep Zone. Canary in a cage, long stick, bucket of whitewash to mark the point where the canary keels over. Very ingenious. Oh, later extended to the innovation of a cageful of ferrets hanging from a helicopter by a long cable, with a man on the ground with binoculars signalling where the danger point kicks in. Perfect. This is a great book, full of deliciously understated humour.
The outside world realizes something fishy is going on the next morning, as telephone lines don’t respond and buses mysteriously fail to continue on their post-Midwich routes.
Here comes the army! (Not to mention M.I.) A high-flying scout plane catches a glimpse of a strangely shaped dome in the epicentre of the sleep zone; a closer-flying plane crashes, pilot apparently overcome by whatever-it-is.
A nerve gas?? Could it be…possibly…The Russians?! (Or “the Ivans”, as they are referred to by one of the side characters, which I must confess amused me greatly for some strange reason. Oh, dear. Not sure what that says about me. Probably nothing good.)
Nope, it’s not the Russians. It’s – wait for it – ALIENS! (Hey, it’s Wyndham. Was this ever even a question?)
The “dome” vanishes.
Everyone wakes up. (Except for a few unlucky souls caught in burning houses, or overexposed to the elements.)
Life returns to normal. For a month or three, anyway.
Because quite suddenly, quite coincidentally (it at first appears) there are an astonishing number of pregnancies becoming evident in the population of Midwich. As in, every woman of child-bearing age. Virgin schoolgirls, sedate housewives, the younger partner of the local lesbian couple, the adult daughter of the local squire and her youngish stepmother. All of them. Sixty-plus expectant mothers, all at the same stage of gravidness, estimated date of conception…well…you figure it out.
How interesting! How strange. A press ban is imposed and – this being England in the 1950s, an apparently rule-abiding place – the press politely abides by the word from on high. Nothing happening at Midwich. Just a little conceptional anomaly. Move along. Nothing to see here…
The babies are born, all of them – aside from the few obviously “naturally” conceived – with perfectly formed limbs, silken skin, and those golden eyes. And strange powers of mind. For the babies appear to be able to compel their mothers to certain actions. Baby hungry? Mother stops in mid stride on the high street, plunks herself down on the curb, and hikes up her blouse. Baby poked by diaper pin? Mother turns pin on herself, stabbing and stabbing in self punishment. Little things like that.
Interesting.
The babies show astonishing growth, maturing roughly twice as fast as a normal child would. And there is a remarkable phenomenon becoming apparent: the children all communicate by thought. All of the girls are linked, as are all of the boys. When a special school is set up to a.) educate and b.) study, it becomes the norm for the lessons to be taught to only one representative of each sex, the others showing mastery of the skill or concept as soon as the representative learner masters it.
Where’s this all going, you ask?
In a sentence: Humanity-as-we-know-it is doomed.
These are our replacements, sent to colonize Earth by an alien super race.
Well, by George! This can’t be allowed to happen, can it?!
But…but…but…they’re children.
I am stopping here. This is a vintage science fiction book worth reading, for under all the clichés and stereotypes and era-expected maunderings, it’s rather clever and nicely thought-provoking and (to borrow a cliché myself) a rattling good read, in a well-mannered, deeply English sort of way.
(“The Ivans.” Ha! Still makes me laugh. Can’t you just hear the plummy yet deadpan way in which this is intoned, speaker with one eyebrow cocked? Gorgeous.)
8/10.
Oh, yes. The Midwich Cuckoos was used as the basis for the now-classic 1960 horror film Village of the Damned, as well as its deeply panned 1995 remake. Don’t let that put you off. The book is really jolly good.
Leaves & Pages 
I’m enjoying your Wyndham posts. I first read The Chrysalids in high school, which sent me off in search of other novels by the man. Sadly, the only other one I could find was The Day of the Triffids. Between big box stores and online sellers its tempting to say kids today are spoiled… but as a wise friend once said, “You can never spoil a child by giving them a book.”
Dare I hope for a review of The Chrysalids? You’re spoiling me.
I never read The Chrysalids as a “novel study” book in high school, but I do seem to remember borrowing a copy from the stack kept for that reason in one of my English classrooms; I was, as you were, immediately hooked. I remember also reading The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes as a teen. All of the others were picked up in various secondhand book stores over the years. I’m still missing a few of the short story collections, which I know I will acquire at some point; Wyndham’s shorts are quite brilliant.
Which brings me to your second comment regarding the accessibility of books to today’s young people. You’re right – they are lucky in a way we couldn’t even imagine way back in our youthful days. I grew up in a small forest industry-ranching town in the B.C. interior. We did have a “new books” bookstore, which I patronized occasionally when feeling particularly flush during summer job periods, and a fantastic secondhand bookstore, which moved about from time to time, from cheap basement space to cheap basement space. One awful year the building it was in burned down; I remember standing on the street looking into the ruined cellar with its soggy, sooty stacks of utterly ruined paperbacks and quietly mourning the tragedy, for who knows what was lost in that conflagration? By my teen years I was already very much aware of the serendipity of bookstore browsing, and of the glorious sport of author hunting. Our little town contained some serious readers and luckily for me and my ilk a lot of them patronized The Book Bin, swapping things and dropping off their once-reads. Me, I never turned anything in, which accounts for many snide comments over the years from friends helping me move between various young adult years’ homes: “How many books do you have, anyway?!”, and the ever popular, “Have you read all of these?!!!” Answers: “Lots, and getting more all the time”, and “Yes. Yes I have. Most of them than once.”
Where was I? I seem to have wandered a bit.
Ah, yes, young people. Books. Yes, lucky devils. My daughter in particular picked up on the glories of ABE and such early on; she is proficient in hunting down things she desires, which is a useful skill to have for her at present as she is presently working in our town’s “new books” bookstore, and one of the services on offer is the tracking down of out-of-print books for the less internet savvy. (For a cost, of course.)
I think you may safely expect a post regarding The Chrysalids in the nearish future. I’m quite enjoying my reengagement with the Wyndham books, and I even have one waiting which I haven’t previously read, Web, which I do believe was released after Wyndham’s death. My son read it and reported that it wasn’t quite up to par with some of the others; we shall see. Something about a strain of super-deadly spiders, people on an island…
Hey, while I have you on the line, as it were, a couple of things.
Ever heard of The Eskimo Invasion, by Hayden Howard, 1967? I’m reading this right now, with the joyous but slightly queasy glee I felt while tackling The Last Canadian. It might be in the running to challenge Heine’s magnum opus for its place as stupidest Canadian novel. Or maybe not; I’m only on page 40; things might look up. (Or not. Ha!)
And Margaret Millar. I am teetering on the brink of taking the bait you keep dangling about how rewarding you find her work, but to date my only experience with her has been through what I felt was the readable but not outstandingly fantastic The Murder of Miranda. Is that one of her “minor” works? I suspect so; I hope so. Your thoughts on where that one stands in the scale of “just okay” to “absolute best” would be most appreciated.
Cheers!
I was onboard when big box stores (read: Chapters) first opened in Canada for no other reason than I remembered the limited selection of our local W.H. Smith. Imagine, more than 100,000 titles! The first Chapters I entered stocked every Steinbeck title in print! And I don’t pay much attention to Steinbeck.
The field was changing… and then Amazon entered and altered it forever (or so it seems).
The Eskimo Invasion by Hayden Howard! I’ve never heard of it. Now that I have I can’t help but think of White Eskimo by Harold Horwood… and your review of same. Was Hayden Howard Canadian? I don’t suppose I should expect an author biography from Ballantine Books.
The first Millar I ever read was Fire Will Freeze, sent my way by an old flatmate. He’d landed a job in New York with Harold Ober, the agency… I almost wrote “handling her estate,” though she was then living amongst us.
It was the wrong place to start. Until I read her debut, The Invisible Worm>, Fire Will Freeze was my least favourite Millar. I felt much the same way you did about The Murder of Miranda (which I haven’t read): It was readable. Interestingly, The Invisible Worm> and Fire Will Freeze both take place in a mansion. The major flaw in both is that they have far too many characters, nearly all of whom are suspects.
I can’t claim to being a Millar expert. I’ve read only ten of the twenty-six books published during her lifetime. That said, these five favourites (in order of preference) are recommended without reservation:
An Air That Kills
The Fiend
Vanish in an Instant
Do Evil in Return
Wall of Eyes
Beast in View which won the 1956 Edgar Award for Best Novel, is also recommended.
Here’s hoping you’ll look into Millar. I’m confident you’ll like her.
Out town was too small even for W.H. Smith; it’s been “indie” all the way – and still is today! The bookstore my daughter is employed at was established here some 35 years ago by a local couple and is still in the same family. It’s a challenging business to be in, in this Amazon-era world, but they seem to be doing all right. It’s so encouraging to see the level of “shop local” support in our small communities; it truly is what keeps these places alive, though the mega-stores and online emporiums are hovering forebodingly.
I remember a trip to Vancouver with a school friend’s family when I was in Grade 8; it was a simpler time and we, a couple of 13-year-old girls, were expected to amuse ourselves solo during the day, which meant of course wandering around in the heart of downtown Vancouver. We were staying in a rather posh hotel just off Robson Street (my friend’s father was our local school district’s Superintendent of Schools, down in the big smoke for an educational conference), and we (friend and I) had a grand look at the amazing profusion of bars and nightclubs of the district, and of the somewhat sunlight-bedazzled people-of-the-evening still loitering there in the daylight hours. Then I discovered a shopping block with bookstores. It was gloriously overwhelming to the country mouse. I spent, quite literally, hours in those shops, till my friend gave me up and went back to the hotel, leaving me to find my own way home. I spent my whole small nest egg on books that day: three Jorge Amados and (funny you should mention him!) two Steinbecks for my dad.
So. Hayden Howard. I did some snooping about and he’s not Canadian after all, which I’d assumed because The Eskimo Invasion is absolutely set in Canada, with references to the professorial wranglings at McGill University and the various Canadian governmental policies regarding Far Northern economic development, resource exploration and extraction, and the thorny problems of how best to deal with the indigenous peoples of those areas. It’s all very 1960s and deeply paternalistic, and is fascinating as a snapshot-in-time sort of novel, quite apart from the surreal sci-fi plot. This HH is from California; he was primarily a short story writer – and quite a successful/well regarded one – The Eskimo Invasion was originally a novella, padded out to novel size. The novella was nominated for a Nebula Award of its year, as was the longer novel in its turn.
Hayden Howard shares with Harold Horwood the depiction of the Eskimo-Inuit as absolutely childlike innocents in need of whiteman overlooking, as well as an off-puttingly salacious glee in the sexual willingness of the women.
Still working my way through this one. My husband says, “Keep reading. It get progressively more strange. Right up your material-for-critiquing-online alley.” Apparently he read it a few weeks ago, when I first brought it home. Righto, then. I shall soldier on.
Thank you for the Millar hints.
Onward!
Everyone seems to be reading Wyndham at the moment, and I’ve enjoyed reading the reviews but am not, alas, persuaded to re-read him, although I accept his work is interesting. I’ve never been a fan of sci-fi or horror, but read several of his books when I was at school (we were studying the history of the novel and looking at genres rather than set books) and hated all of them. I know I ought to broaden my horizons and try again, but I really don’t feel I can.
No need to apologize! The world is full of books for this very reason, that we all have personally unique tastes in reading. 🙂 I always think of our collective reading records as a series of overlapping Venn diagrams: here we share a love of the same things, and just over there we diverge, overlapped by someone else, and so on ad finitum.It’s a great part of the joy of reading book blogs – to share a love of the similar, get ideas for future reading, and also to take a vicarious peek at things we’d never actually want to tackle ourselves. Yes? 🙂
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