[A few years ago I started a blog to keep track of my scattershot thoughts about books I was reading. At some point a malicious hacker or computer virus wrecked the whole damn thing and I gave it up. Recently I fished a couple of pieces I wrote out of the Internet Wayback Machine, so here’s one of them.]

It seems strange to me now that I should only just read H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds; I actually kind of surprised myself when I realized I hadn’t read it sooner, although it’s possible I read some abridged version as a kid (this is how I got a lot of my classics, and for a long I was under the impression that I’d read a lot more literature than I actually had. Also in a similar vein: old MAD magazine movie parodies, which substituted for actually seeing, for instance Love Story or Altered States).

I was also surprised, reading it this week, at how much I loved it. It’s a great book, full of really intelligent thinking, and really pretty modern for 1898, not just scientifically, but in the way Wells uses a very humble perspective to view very big events. This is something that had really impressed me about Steven Spielberg’s recent movie adaptation..I loved the “ant’s eye view” POV, where you never saw, say, the President and his staff deliberating, or even establishing shots of spaceships etc etc.

The book is almost entirely told from the perspective of the narrator, an unnamed essayist (all we really know of that is that he’s interrupted while at work on an essay about “the probable development of Moral Ideas”), and when the narrative does diverge it’s not to refer to some official source or larger narrative but rather to relate the similarly humble experiences of his brother-in-law. It’s effective because it reads not as science fiction, but as a war story.

It’s not rich in character (we learn very little about the narrator and his inner life until the end), except, interestingly enough, Wells’s portrayal of a couple of the more unfortunate victims of the Martians: a deranged curate and a drunken, delusional artilleryman. I love when the latter says “This isn’t a war, it never was a war, any more than there’s a war between men and ants.” Such a great line, and you might even see it as Wells’s justification for the narrative book’s point-of-view.

Wells may not have been the best at writing character or emotion, but what he really excels at is describing incident. The green flashes that signal the arrival of the Martian “meteors,” the slow emergence of the aliens and their machines, the suddenness of their destructive power, the mass movement of people. And, in what is another one of my favourite parts of the book, the way ordinary life goes on until death shows up right on people’s doorsteps. The detail work here is wonderful. He’s also great at describing ideas: who the Martians are, what they eat, how they live and die, is brilliantly thought out and doesn’t read at all dated, although I admit my scientific expertise is limited.

I’m still not sure, though, how he is at atmosphere, and I suspect not very good. What’s throwing me off is the edition I read, which features a beautiful cover and inside illustrations by Edward Gorey, one of my favourite illustrators ever. His drawings bring so much to the book and I get the feeling they provide, at least for me, an ambience that Wells’s writing does not. I’m never going to get around to hooking up my scanner and digitizing them myself [I never did], so here’s a couple I found online:

They’re not really what I’d like to show..the people and the human environs

..but I hope you get the idea. And if you get the chance I would really pick up this amazing edition. It was originally published by the Looking Glass Library (an imprint Gorey co-founded and acted as art director for) and has recently come back into print thanks to the always-awesome New York Review Books.

Here’s the cover (the image doesn’t really do it justice as it’s a wrap-around):

•  20 February 2010