'THE INHERITORS’ BY WILLIAM GOLDING

(The final instalment of Pariah Elites. Beware, prehistoric PLOT SPOILERS lie below!)

“Here is a picture. Someone is - other. Not one of the people.”

Seeing The Picture

William Golding always cited his second novel, ’The Inheritors’, (1955) as his favourite, even it it never achieved the recognition awarded its predecessor ’Lord Of the Flies’. It’s centred on the people, a pre-human group from stone age times. And tells of their encounter with the new people, modern humans. Now surely such a thing cannot belong in a series on pariah elites, alongside van Vogt potboilers? Don’t be so fast…

Its distinction is to be written not just from the perspective of the people, but in an approximation of the language they would have used. Or, as Golding’s daughter Judy more accurately put it: “my father uses our language to show the lives of people who don’t really have it.” And accordingly every sentence, whether prose or dialogue, deepens our understanding of the people.

The language is therefore simple and direct, at points almost reading like stage directions. But still with something evocative to it:

“The red creature turned to the right and trotted slowly towards the far end of the terrace. Water was cascading down the rocks beyond the terrace from the melting ice in the mountains. The river was high and flat and drowned the edge of the terrace.”

And they speak so simply and directly, of course, because they lead a simple and direct life, chiefly based around foraging.

“Life was fulfilled, there was no need to look farther for food, to-morrow was secure and the day after that was so remote that no one would bother to think of it.”

Their perspective is in many ways child-like, including ascribing sentience to objects if they’re seen moving.

“The water was not awake like the river or the fall but asleep, spreading there to the river and waking up.”

But the best-known aspect of this is their communicating via ‘pictures’, as in their phrase “I see/ do not see that picture.” This suggests two things, that they have not ventured far into abstract thought, and that idea and memory are not separated. Stuck with a problem they assume it must have been encountered before, so the answer will lie in the past. While “this is a new thing” is said like a curse. Though we casually use phrases such as “I see what you mean”, there is something transportive about this. I first heard it decades ago, in a TV documentary on Golding, and found it has remained in my head ever since.

At the same time, their other senses are so acute they are described as having their own autonomy. For example, Lok’s feet are “clever” in dodging obstacles as he runs, while at another point “Lok’s ears spoke to Lok” but he doesn’t hear them as he’s asleep. They follow a trail less by visual clues than by scent, and can become so locked into the task their other senses barely register with them.

And speaking of Lok… His name is literally the first word of the novel and we stay with him right up until the penultimate chapter. The slowest-witted of the adult people, often in a state of “obedient dumbness”, he therefore becomes an unreliable narrator. Events are described through him faithfully but not always comprehendingly. We’re often required to read past his words to understand what’s actually going on. At points, others in the group are required to explain to him, and thereby us, what’s really happening.

But also, what he doesn’t perceive is as important as what he does. For example, when he first sees the new people he assumes they have “bone faces”. Which turns out to be their skin, but in the hitherto unfamiliar shade of white.

He hears the new people’s chatter, of course incomprehensible to him. But he continues to assume they can understand him. And he’s similarly unable to comprehend their hostility, like a schoolboy unable to take in that he’s being bullied, let alone do something about it. When they fire an arrow at him, he first assumes they must be sending him a gift.

But let’s ask an awkward question. If written through him so comprehensively, why isn’t it written as if by him, in the first person? Instead the novel opens more cinematically, the members of the tribe as brought into view one by one as they enter a setting. And at this point, emotions are given visual indicators. (“The grin faded and his mouth opened till the lower lip hung down.”) Though internal states do creep in as it progresses. (“Quite suddenly he was swept up by a tide of happiness and exultation.”)

The answer is this novel can’t be too centred on an individual, because it’s about a collective. Lok would not have seen himself as a discrete being, but as a part of the people. In one passage, heading on an errand, he looks back on the rest of the group from a vantage point where he’s no longer visible to them:

“All at once Lok was frightened because she had not seen him. The old woman knew so much; yet she had not seen him. He was cut off and no longer one of the people; as though his communion with the other had changed him. He was different from them and they could not see him. He had no words to formulate these thoughts but he felt his difference and invisibility as a cold wind that blew on his skin.”

And this is not in reaction to being lost or exiled, just temporarily separate. Later when he first sees the others he recoils into the comforting sense of being one of the people:

“They came in, closer and closer, not as they would come into the overhang, recognising home and being free of the whole space; they drove in until they were being joined to him, body to body. They shared a body as they shared a picture. Lok was safe.”

Then, right at the end of the novel, one section switches over to impersonal narration. For the first time we see Lok rather than see through him. (“A strange creature, smallish and bowed.”) At this point he’s the only one of his people left, bar a stolen baby. And, as he cannot exist alone, he’s effectively already dead. He’s described objectively because he’s become an object. When the root they’ve made the totem of their deity, Oa, is described simply as a tree root its heartbreaking, but heartbreaking precisely because its an unarguable truth.

There’s a section in Wyndham’s ’Day Of the Triffids’ (1951) which parallels this:

“The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part of no whole: a freak without a place…no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.”

This communion also manifests in a profound empathy. When the old man of the group falls in the freezing river “the group of people crouched round Mal and shared his shivers.” They’re doing more than warming him with their body heat. They see no particular distinction from if they had fallen into the river. ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ isn’t a credo to aspire to, it’s a functional feature of their lives.

Their ‘telepathy’ must be seen as stemming from here. Though that’s the term commonly used by commentators, and it would best suit this series, I’m not sure it’s quite right. Certainly not in the sense of a phoneless phone call. There’s a sense shared between them which is a combination of suggestibility and empathy. They share the same experiences which frame their thought, so share much the same thought, so can project their ‘pictures’ between brows. And the suggestion can travel because it is non-verbal, akin to the way a simple phrase can get communicated across a bad connection.

And what’s crucial here is that the people do not lose something nebulous such as ‘innocence’, even if that’s how the book is often described. They lose tangible things, a group bond and a perspective on the world perhaps beyond what we can imagine.

None of this is to suggest they lack individuality, or fail to see any sense of it in each other. Fa is clearly more acute than Lok. She not only works out before him the threat the new people pose, she hides from him her own realisation that they’ve killed a child. It’s that they don’t see the significance in individuality that we do.

The people are in an interchange between tribe and family group, from grandparents/elders down to infants. This was perhaps partly to make the cast list manageable, and partly to make them more sympathetic to Fifties audiences. (Golding’s daughter has suggested they were based on his own family.) Lineage is an unimportant question to them, subservient to if not overridden by the sense they are the people. Inferred from his actions, Liku must be Lok’s child, but he never refers to her as such.

Are We the Baddies?

How accurate is any of this? Golding seems to have told different tales over the years about the level of research he did. But we know he wrote the book quickly, and in the covering note originally sent to his publisher he confessed to doing little. Most likely, he simply relied on the knowledge he’d already absorbed and concentrated on writing.

I’ve done no great deal of research either, but some seems solid enough. Contrary to a common error, the people are nomadic rather than itinerant. As the novel opens they’re travelling from their winter to their summer quarters, and on reaching there act like coming home. It’s explained in some detail how they’re able to harvest fire but not make it, so carefully carry embers around with them embedded in clay.

We also discover they see it as sinful to hunt and kill, but acceptable to snatch already-dead prey from predators. Yet not only do we now know Neanderthals hunted, I’d not sure this mode of subsistence has existed anywhere. (Please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong!)

In Golding’s day it was still accepted that Neanderthals lacked the culture and communication skills of the Cro-Magnons, and so were if not eliminated then out-competed by their more innovative cousins. The discoveries of subsequent years have not exactly been kind to these easy notions. It would seem truer to say they did things differently, rather than not at all.

But then again, was this written as an exercise in scholarly accuracy? I do not see that picture. The Bible story of Cain slaying Abel is a kind of secondary Fall myth, where man turned against man and so became marked forever. It’s often regarded now as a mythologised retelling of hunting versus farming. This could be seen the same way, save that the stages represented are hunting versus gathering. We are better off reading it as a myth or fable than as a history of pre-history.

So it doesn’t make much literal sense that Lok looks uncomprehendingly upon the new people bonking, when he’s almost certainly a father himself. Or that the new people are white, when as more recent arrivals from Africa they’d more likely have been darker skinned than the natives. But this is a work of fiction, which affects us via symbols. Lok looks upon the new people as a child would upon adults. And the new people need to remind us of us, at a time when Golding’s readers would have been almost entirely white. So white they are.

How many times have you seen this trope in films? An exploratory mission is crossing a landscape, which seems devoid of life but turns out to contain hostile natives. The camera pans to their narrowed eyes, peering sinisterly from behind foliage. Golding reverses this, keeping the Cro-Magnons at a distance for almost the first half of the book. It progresses almost schematically, we see them first as distant murky shapes, very slowly getting closer to them. A whole chapter is given over to Lok and Fa observing their camp from hiding, literally reversing the standard perspective.

And their lurking at the periphery of the people’s vision is highly effective dramatically. This book is as compelling a read as anything else in this series, despite the relative lack of gaudy pulp covers, rocket ships and missile strikes.

The new people are compared to “when the fire flew away and ate up all the trees,” a collective trauma. But everyone instinctively runs from a fire, while they have something compelling about them. At one point Lok finds a flagon of their beer. Fa warns him off it, but he feels compelled to drink. “It was a bee-water, smelling of honey and wax and decay, it drew toward and repelled, it frightened and excited like the people themselves.” Soon, intoxicated by it, he cries out he now is the new people. It’s like Pandora’s Box as a liquid.

But of course all this raises the further question - why would we need such a fall myth be told? Despite what almost every writer in this series has assumed, evolution is not about linear progress but branching. Following one branch precludes the others, but that doesn’t make one branch objectively better.

In which case, why does this persist? Why, if that ’out-competed’ theory about the Neanderthals was so baseless, was it so widespread for so long? Of course, because people wanted it to be true. A capitalist society will forever try to divide us up into two groups, the entrepreneurs and forward thinkers versus the passive non-adaptors, who need to be dragged along the march of progress. (As one example, in Britain the Tories currently favour the term “the blob” for any and all of their adversaries, with its connotations of an inert blocking mass.) It seems to make sense to us, and so we project it back through time.

We serve ourselves up a fait accompli. The Cro-Magnons must surely have been innovators because they survived to become us. The Neanderthals cannot have been, because they died out. It’s a cross between doing down the neighbours and dissing the dead, in order to big ourselves up. And, in so doing, bestowing upon us an abundance of the things we regard as important.

So stone age dramas most commonly become a version of the Robinson Crusoe myth. They set brutishness up against an embryonic form of civilisation, smarts trumping strength, as if this was the era we struggled to rid ourselves of alternately our childhood or our ‘animal-ness’. (With the two often lazily elided together.)

As Susan Mandala has said: “Scientific and fictional accounts of human evolution share the same basic structure and elements as fairy tales, with humans emerging as transcendent after overcoming a series of obstacles.”

Meanwhile, over the other side of the fence, I have sometimes been treated to a hippie theory that spiritual, creative people (such as the Irish) were descended from Neanderthals and grasping, possessive types (aka the English) from Cro-Magnons. You may already be able to guess how accurate that is. As so often, the supposedly ‘alternative’ theory retains the mainstream concepts while somehow trying to invert the value system between them.

Golding is not, of course, as foolish as that. The people don’t lead some Edenic life, but one periodically plagued by hunger. Fa, the brains of the outfit, is firmly told to stop having ideas because girls don’t do that sort of thing. But like the hippies he retains the concepts. Except in his case he asks what downside those advances might have brought with them, and devises a scenario which best demonstrates his concerns.

The people live as part of the landscape. Lok’s reaction to returning to their summer camp is: “The river had not gone away either or the mountains. The overhang had waited for them. Everything had waited for them; Oa had waited for them. Even now she was pushing up the spikes of the bulbs, fattening the grubs, reeking the smells out of the earth, bulging the fat buds out of every crevice and bough.”

While the new people impose themselves upon the landscape, chopping down trees, broadening paths to carry their canoes. Tools become cursed objects, functionally useful but separating their wielder from the world, imposing upon them a utilitarian mindset. What makes them more civilised also makes them more savage. (Disclaimer: the people will use rocks and sticks as tools, in an impromptu manner, but do little to fashion them and don’t hang on to them after their immediate function is served. The only exception seems to be the thorn bushes they hold onto as defensive weapons.)

Ellethinks saw the distinctive thing about the new people as their use of abstract language, focusing on a scene where their onset stimulates linguistic concepts even in Lok. (And, though she doesn’t say so, to a greater degree in the smarter Fa, who’s able to devise a pincer assault on the new people.) This is a valuable point, but in itself insufficient. There must have been a means by which the new people were able to develop this enhanced language, it can’t by itself have instigated their difference from the people. It must be effect, not cause.

The final chapter switches to follow Tuami, one of the new people. They have taken the people’s baby. (Though I don’t think it was known then that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals interbred.) He whittles at a knife he is making, whose handle will be half of the baby and half one of his own people. When it’s finished he intends to kill the group leader and usurp his role. The last line is “he could not see if the line of darkness had an ending.”

The Yesterday People

So to return to the initial question, does this belong? There’s one obvious similarity to other Pariah Elite novels. If in varying degrees, they try to capture in prose how the world would look to a differently working mind. But that’s a partial likeness at best. And Golding’s pessimism seems entirely at odds with the teleological optimism of something like ’The Tomorrow People’. 

And yet for all that they’re remarkably similar. Not just in their nascent form of telepathy, but their collective identity (that shared use of “people” is scarcely a co-incidence) which is enough of an erosion of the self/other distinction to turn them from violence. Andrew Rilstone smartly said that for all their jaunting and telekinesis “the Tomorrow People's main power is that they are nice.”

’The Tomorrow People’ portrays us in a state of becoming, for the nice will inherit the earth. While the people are effectively the Yesterday People, the last of the nice. But Golding’s pessimism isn’t absolute. He doesn’t say the line of darkness had no ending, only that Tuami could not at that point see it. The knife he makes is dualistic, and Neanderthal DNA still lies within us. We may see that picture yet.

‘THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS’ BY JOHN WYNDHAM

(The latest in our look at Pariah Elites in fiction. Again with PLOT SPOILERS. First instalment here. Full list here.)

“Who are these children? There’s something about the way they look at one with those curious eyes. They are - strangers, you know.”

”In Arcadian Indistinction”

So John Wyndham wrote ‘The Chrysalids’, a commentary on the generation gap via the metaphor of psi powers. Which could be summed up a one-nil to youth. But, fifty-two when this was published and not necessarily down with the kids, he essentially played out the scenario again - and in reverse. ’The Midwich Cuckoos’ (1957) was to take on the perspective of the parents.

Should you not know the plot… everyone in the rustic village of Midwich is struck asleep at once. And when they awake, all the women have become pregnant. (Even the virgins, in what cannot feel other than a twist on immaculate conception.) And the children they carry turn out to be cuckoo-like aliens, sporting.. you may be ahead here… enhanced mental powers. If 'The Chrysalids’ could be reduced to the line “they cannot tolerate our rise”, this would be ‘Adults come from Earth, children from Venus.’

Brecht’s plays ‘He Who Says Yes’ and ‘He Who Says No’ (both 1930) rehearse twin arguments, whether a child should or should not be left behind for the greater good. But he rigs the odds each time, introducing different criteria which determine each of the courses of action, undermining any actual comparisons. And this is essentially what Wyndham does in these two books.

(I rather like the idea of two novels looking at the same events, one from one side’s perspective, the other from the norms. As if such divergent views couldn’t be contained within one cover. But that’s not at all what Wyndham has done.)

First and most obviously, we have the change in setting to ’The Chrysalids’ - back to more familiar territory in about every way. As we’ve looked at before on this blog, as one of the first countries to urbanise Britain developed a culture which venerated rural life. More than Big Ben or Saint Pauls, the Post Office and the bicycled bobby were our symbols. Wartime films such as ’Went The Day Well?’ (1942) showed rustic villages being taken over by foreign invaders not as some staging-post to London, but as if the heart of the nation was already seized.

And Wyndham does something similar with his more alien disturbing of Midwich’s restive calm. The first chapter reads like one of those spotters’ guides to English villages, pointing out the age of the apse in the local Church, so beloved to my parents. (He wrote much of the novel in the Hampshire village of Steep, as if gazing out the window for location information. The nearby, and similar-sounding, Midhurst has also been suggested as a source.)

Had none of the events in ’The Chrysalids’ happened, it would still have been a dystopia. Not just for the powered children, objectively a dystopia. Instead it’s their telepathy which offers a route out of the situation. Whereas, had none of the events in ’Midwich Cuckoos’ happened, had none of the Children arrived, English villagers would have led lives of, in Wyndham’s phrase, “Arcadian indistinction”.

Murray Ewing describes Wyndham’s writing style as “analgesic”. But its in Midwich where he goes into analgesic overdrive. The horror of the situation doesn’t rear up, it creeps up on you, slowly and remorselessly.

’Day of The Triffids’ had a weight of backstory to convey, but front loaded action before filling us in. This book devotes much time to explaining what happened in Midwich before the incident, which boil down to “nothing much”. Which may lay it on a little. The first six chapters, the first quarter of the book, tellingly have Midwich in their name. And only in the last of these do the mass pregnancies even happen. Though, inevitably, we now know what comes next and are in a hurry to get there. Wyndham’s intended reader didn’t, and so quite possibly wasn’t.

Further, ’Triffids’ stuck rigidly to its narrator’s perspective. For around half the book, he’s trying to find his love interest and we don’t know where she is because he doesn’t. ’Chrysalids’ isn’t so rigid because of the telepathy conceit, but has times when other characters fall out of contact with the narrator.

This book has a first-person narrator too. But there’s whole chapters he’s not present for, sections which go on so long you forget about him until he’s back. (There’s a brief ‘explanation’ he’s recounting events he was told of later.) At times, you’d be forgiven for thinking his presence was some sort of contractual obligation, which only required honouring formally.

Why the difference? If narrated by a Midwich local, this book has the village’s voice. Because this is not one person’s story, its the village’s story. With the assumption Midwich stands for the Home Counties, which stand for England, which stand for Britain. While we may react with derision to such a notion now, readers at the time would have taken this for granted. And its done because this is a story about our species encountering another. There needs to be a way this is conveyed collectively.

But things are taken further than that, and for their own reasons…

Mostly, one character relays events to some of the others, which they then discuss which something not far from philosophical detachment. Throughout, events occur at a distance - reported on, or sometimes elided over. Both ’Triffids’ and ’Chrysalids’ are rip-roaring action-adventures by comparison.

Advice is dispatched by Zellaby, some sort of public intellectual, the pipe-puffing equivalent of Dr. Vorless from ’Triffids’. (It’s surprising how many relate him to Coker, it’s definitely Vorless.) However, Vorless’ authority is effectively conveyed by his only appearing once, giving us our instructions and going. Whereas here its not the narrator but Zellaby’s perspective which dominates, which is of interested, detached contemplation But as we see him through the narrator this distances him further. We’re told: “as so often with Zellaby, the gap between theory and practical circumstances seemed too inadequately bridged.”

To use a term Graham Greene was fond of, this is a story of an involvement. The whole book can often feel like one of his many discourses, speculating and ruminating. At first he sees the changed Children purely as a fascinating object for study. But in the end… quite literally at the end he has to take himself out of his former existence, pontificating in studies before the dinner gong goes off, and get to grips with events. From thought to deed.

But Won’t Somebody Please Worry About the Children?

Zellaby is given to saying such things as “the desirability of intermittent periods of social rigidity for the purpose of curbing the subversive energies of a new generation.” Presumably to be brought about by the power of polysllabery alone. Or, at another point…

“The true fruit of this century has little interest in coming to living-terms with innovations; it just greedily grabs them all as they come along. Only when it encounters something really big does it become aware of a social problem at all, and then, rather than make concessions, it yammers for the impossibly easy way out, uninvention, suppression - as in the matter of The Bomb.”

(And we should note all of this gets settled by means of a bomb.)

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was formed the year this book was published. And Midwich’s, and therefore the novel’s, resident intellectual is here to tell us how foolish the demands of those ban-the-bombers are. Though to be clear, they aren’t being compared to the Children. Instead, they’re part of the problem the Children are able to exploit. Lives of post-war ease and comfort have left them ill-equipped for this struggle.

Why this desire to dunk on the new generation? One barometer of this would be the increase in higher education. Though the rise would curve up more steeply in the Sixties, the trend had already begun. And higher education offered youth something much closer to a space of their own than the parental home or workplace. The era where your children simply grew to replace you as you wore out, new parts to be slipped in the same mechanism, that was was coming to a close.

As an example, compare a still from the film (more of which anon) to another teacher-and-pupil image, from ’An Unearthly Child’, the first ever episode of ’Doctor Who’. About which I once said: “The focus is less on Susan than the fascination she exerts over her teachers… [they] stand behind, looking to her. But she gazes out of the frame as if it’s a world which doesn’t contain her… expression inscrutable.” (As also said at the time, her mystery is beguiling not threatening, a significant difference. But the similarity between the images is still striking.)

While one Penguin cover frames a single Child in the foreground, again looking away from his environment, in the all-black outfit stereotypical to Beatniks.

However, as with van Vogt’s slans, the Children develop faster than regular kids and so are of indeterminate age. In some, this leads to a tendency to take their oldest age and go into moral panics about the teenager, juvenile delinquency and so on. But this tendency shouldn’t be over-indulged. Much of the book is about the disturbing effect of them being simultaneously the Children and regular children.

Some themes are era-specific, others universal. And for something that’s universal, try this. You have a child. You created them from yourself, and yet they’re someone else. They arrive as a stranger to you. You cannot simply impose your will on them like they’re a remote limb of yours. Changeling stories unsurprisingly go back into folklore. (And get referenced here.)

Yet, as is often, this universal theme had an era-specific context. Dr. Spock’s manual ’Baby and Child Care’ had been influential on post-war attitudes. He asked parents to take their cues from children rather than impose a routine on them, ‘demand feeding’ becoming almost a byword for his school of thought. This was based on the idea that a child’s actions should be seen as natural and normal. And the inevitable phobia which came from this reassuring voice was an ‘otherly’ child, who was not and could not be explicable to you.

And yet who is missing from this perspective? Who is definitely not detached, and from the off?

“It’s all very well for a man. He doesn’t have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he’s always on the outside. He can never know what it’s like, even in a normal way - so what sort of an idea can he have of this? - Of how it feels to like awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? - As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator…. And then to go on wondering… what, just what it may be that one is being forced to incubate. Of course you can’t understand how that feels - how could you? It’s degrading, it’s intolerable. I shall crack soon. I know I shall.”

Which seems so central to the main conceit that surely the whole thing would have been much more effective if our central character had been a woman. Yet of course here this is effectively a short-term plot obstacle, an attack of the vapours by Zellaby’s wife, to be overcome by reassuring male voices. And - par for the course - even this isn’t actually said by a woman, it’s Zellaby reporting his wife’s words.

The narrator has a wife too, but she is un-induced due to a plot device. While the child of Zellaby’s wife, despite the outburst above, turns out to be normal. His daughter does have a changed child, but he succeeds in sending her away from Midwich and thereby out of the novel. In short Wyndham seems to signpost this road, then baulk at the prospect and instead detour around it. So if analysts don’t seem to talk about this theme much, its submerged in the book itself.

”The Eyes That Shine"

The book was the first work of Wyndham’s to be filmed, in 1960. A film about as successful as the later adaptation of ’Triffids' was a failure. But that success may have led to it over-imprinting itself on the book in our minds. One edition used a film still on the cover, not something ever done with ’Triffids’. (And yes, it’s the image we looked at earlier.)

In general the differences are effectively conveyed by the change in title, to ’Village of the Damned’. The film’s much more dramatic and suspenseful, a streamlining of the sometimes languid novel. And if that sounds like a good thing, it probably is. It demonstrates how much of the book can be cut without losing anything essential, how much the analgesia was over-applied. The problem is, the film’s success is largely on its own terms.

Google Image ‘Village of the Damned 1960’ (to cut out the later version) and what dominates is those malevolent glowing eyes, lighting up whenever the Children use their sinister powers. The trailer opened with them and they were spelt out on the film poster. (“Beware the stare that will paralyse the will of the world!”)

In the book, in a not unusual motif, their strangeness also lies in their eyes. Yet in a characteristically quieter way, their eyes don’t light up but their irises are gold. (There are perhaps two phrases from the book which the film built on - “they had a quality of glowing gold” and “The… boy turned, and looked at us. His golden eyes were hard, and bright.”) Yet this film invention is present on almost all the later book covers. Only the 2000 Penguin edition keeps to the gold original.

Further, in the book they look alike. Not similar, not even like identical twins, more like clones, unrecognisable even by their birth mothers. There’s way more of them than in the film, in fact there’s fifty-eight. It becomes evident they share one mind. (“It will not be an individual who answers me, or performs what I ask, it will be an item of the group.”)

They mostly wander Midwich in an undifferentiated mass, neither spoken to by nor speaking to anyone. Direct, sustained conversation with them doesn’t happen until more than two-thirds in. (And they influence us with a thought. Why would they bother to talk to us much?) And when they do speak they neither try to conceal their nature, not exult in their success. (“He spoke simply, and without innuendo, as one stating a fact.”)

The film may well improve things by upping the stakes in giving Zellaby a changed son of his own. Amusingly called David, the same as the lead in ’The Chrysalids’. (Though most likely only by coincidence.) Yet this takes away even as it gives, assigning the Children a natural leader and spokesman, undercutting their collective otherness.

And if the dominant image of the film is the shiny eyes, the best-known scene is the final showdown - with the “I-must-think-of-a-brick-wall” business. Zellaby first wishes to break through the wall surrounding their minds and ends up building one to defend his own, his character arc in microcosm. (Its the briefcase, badge of his academic authority, that conceals the bomb.)

But this is played entirely differently in the book. There, as the narrator phrases it, the Children become children again, trustingly carrying in what they believe is part of his film projector equipment. It becomes almost a variant of the “could you kill baby Hitler?” quandary.

A dog reacts against baby David, as animals would in the later and more clear-cut horror ’The Omen’ (1976). Some versions of the film poster called them “Child-demons”. We’re explicitly told, in a actual dialogue quote, “these children are bad.” While Wyndham said, in a 1960 BBC interview, “they aren’t so evil in the original story”.

In the film the children are invaders, if with a slightly different strategy to the usual march across Westminster Bridge. But in the book they have less a strategy than an assumption - their superiority and therefore their success are taken as self-evident, they just need to await victory. And in this way the parallels actually function, they are like ’The Chrysalids’, in particular the Sealand woman who said “we cannot tolerate their obstruction”. As they say…

“This is not a civilised matter, it is a primitive matter. If we exist, we shall dominate you — that is clear and inevitable. Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle?”

While Zellaby comes to understand…

“We, like the other lords of creation before us, will one day be replaced. There are two ways in which it can happen: either through ourselves, by our self-destruction, or by the incursion of some species which we lack the equipment to subdue. Well, here we are now.”

The triffids may gesture towards weird fiction. Their way of being is wholly incomprehensible to us, even as they’re garden plants come to get us. While the Children, however strange and however powerful, have more explicable motivations. While still infants they punish their parents for accidentally harming them, ascribing motive to happenstance as children will. (One mother accidentally jabs her child with a safety pin while changing him, and he causes her to repeatedly jab her own arm.)

Even when older, they tolerate us insofar as we don’t get in their way. They stretch our terms of reference, but they don’t lie wholly outside of them. And this is necessary for the theme of evolution to apply. The Children come next after us.

Evolution was Wyndham’s theme, running (as we’ve seen) through all three of his main books. And there’s an odd paradox at the heart of this, for this “primitive matter” is simultaneously about who is the most evolved. In one sense, cosy Midwich is too evolved to deal with the problem of the Children, in that it’s too removed from the harsh imperatives of life. With nothing to threaten us, we’ve grown languid. The Children arrive to reassert the law of the jungle. (And Midwich’s civility is specifically posed as the problem. Children colonies are set up elsewhere but, foreign being a less well-behaved place, they’re soon wiped out.)

And yet at the same time the Children are more evolved. Evolution is an advance, and they look down at us norms from the next step up the ladder. And yet (again), at the immediate level evolution presents itself as a kind of trial by combat, victors surviving from one day to the next. Evolution is simultaneously a gladiatorial contest, decided in the cut-and-thrust of the arena, and a foregone conclusion.

Notably, both notions are widely considered part of evolution. Yet they’re pretty close to mutually exclusive. What’s more, if the first is true then the Children’s rise is inevitable. It would be like asking about the outcome of a knife fight where one brings a sharpened stone and the other a long-range missile. (And note Zellaby’s arc is not despair at the impossibility of resisting such a powerful foe, it’s about accepting his involvement in the battle of survival.)

Yet if Wyndham was aware of this paradox, there’s no sign of it in the book. His theme is the effect of evolution on popular culture. Yet by definition that means the effect of popular notions of evolution. The fears and dreams it led to didn’t come from it, at least not directly, they were fears and dreams we conjured up ourselves then assigned to it.

And speaking of winners and loser of evolution… well more of that in our final instalment…

'THE CHRYSALIDS’ BY JOHN WYNDHAM

(Another look at Pariah Elites, with more PLOT SPOILERS.)

”Blessed is the norm! Watch thou for the mutant!”

Deviation and Progress 

Brian Aldiss, not always Wyndham’s greatest fan, described ’The Chrysalids’ (1955) as his best book. About which he may well be right. But in a more unarguable point, it’s about a pariah elite possessed of mutant powers. So it fits into our series like a six-fingered glove. (See here for list so far.)

Then on the other hand... The original Penguin version of his breakthrough novel, ’Day of the Triffids’, had described it as “a modified version of what is unhappily known as ‘science fiction’,” his earlier career in American pulps politely elided over. For his writings were now aimed squarely at the regular reader. Which means what has been our standard model, that mutant powers act as a metaphor to big up science fiction fans’ self-image, no longer applies.

But that other hand may be six-fingered too. It only needs a little tweaking…

As we saw last time, ’Day of the Triffids’ essentially came from the culture of the Forties, even if it was published early in the next decade. But much of what makes a good popular writer is the ability to act as an antennae for the zeitgeizt. And this mid-Fifties book, conversely, looked forwards. If van Vogt’s credo was in essence “fans are slans” (even if he didn’t devise that phrase himself), Wyndham’s is “kids become butterflies, adults just stay grubs”.

The conceit is similar enough to ‘The Tomorrow People’ for two different covers to use the same splayed-hand image as it had in its opening credits. But when that specified puberty as the point your powers manifested, here its a more general youth. And that wider range makes it a coming-of-age story. Powers increase with age and, significantly, its the youngest who is the most powerful. While even the older sister of protagonist David lacks them.

In a later introduction, M. John Harrison commented on its appeal to the post-war generation: “They had more in common with each other than with their parents. Their social expectations were raised… they were in possession of a new language… the generation gap was opening up.”

(Wyndham had gone to the ‘progressive’ public school Bedales, which a couple of generations later would be pretty much the type of background the leaders of the Sixties counter-culture came from.)

This being post-nuclear world where only the margins remain inhabitable it’s set in Labrador, Northern Canada. Or a version of it. Much is made of this being Wyndham’s only work to have a fantasy setting. But what that really means is that it’s not set in contemporary South-East England. If strictly speaking it has no real-world equivalent it’s a setting we quickly recognise from elsewhere. It’s a Western, just one where the past-the-border badlands is populated by mutants rather than outlaws. Strictly speaking, it’s Western crossed with a pioneer town of devout Puritans as in ’The Crucible’ (1953). But the two mingle easily enough, especially to us British readers.

Labrador is more Kanas than Oz. And the abnormal, after all, only has meaning in relation to the normal, the mutation to the standard.

Now, you may be about to say that Science Fiction is almost always relabelled Westerns. But this isn’t Flash Gordon, shootouts against a more exotic backdrop. It’s very much set in a material world where people till their own soil, fix their own carts, and hunt with bows and arrows (plus the occasional primitive gun).

And this makes the introduction of telepathy juxtapositional, as strange an interruption to this world as it would be to ours. The adults are obsessed with rooting out ‘deviation’ (as they call mutation) but spend much of the novel looking for it in the wrong place, outer rather than inner, getting all het up over an extra toe. (The novel is somewhat fuzzy over when the young folk first recognise their powers will count as deviation.)

Added to which, telepathy is the only one of the Tomorrow People’s three T’s to be incorporated. And here it means just mind-talk, no mental control or powers of suggestion. There’s a narrowing of unbelievable things, until there’s only one asking to be believed. Which is itself subject to material constraints, a point reiterated even if they’re hazily defined.

”The Shortcomings Of Words"

At the same time telepathy isn’t just phone calls without phones. Telepathy is qualitatively different, a higher form of communication…

“Even some of the things he did not understand properly himself became clearer when we all thought about them.”

Unlike all those other Ts, telepathy only works as a group power. Telepaths can only contact other telepaths. And this ‘thinking-together’ is about the young folk’s ability to immediately put their heads together, similar to Brian Eno’s dictum “everyone is smarter than anyone.”

But it’s more than that…

“I don’t suppose ‘normals’, who can never share their thoughts, can understand how we are so much more part of one another. What comprehension can they have..? Wwe don’t have to flounder among the shortcomings of words; it is difficult for us to falsify or pretend a thought even if we want to: on the other hand, it is almost impossible for us to misunderstand one another.”

We’re told that pre-apocalypse people "were shut off by different languages and different beliefs”, suggesting telepathy is a universal language that will by its nature overcome such divisions. True, there’s limits to this. We’re also told no-one can know David’s love interest Rosalind as well as him, even the other telepaths. But its simultaneously suggests that telepathy enables them to achieve a higher form of love, much as van Vogt did in ’Slan’.

Wyndham’s ‘big three’ novels are surely this, ’Triffids’ and (coming up) 'The Midwich Cuckoos’. Yet while the others have been adapted multiple times, this has only had a 1981 radio version. And surely a main reason is the difficulty of visualising this ‘thinking-together’.

As with ‘The X-Men’, their powers are essentially given a double explanation. Ostensibly they’re mutations due to post-nuclear radiation. But it would be hard not to see teleological evolution’s hand here too. And, as with the X-Men, these two explanations seem rather shoehorned together. In something closer to a ‘serious novel’ than a four-colour comic, where we might expect better.

But they perform different tasks. The first is diegetic and plot-functional, to give the adults a reason to fear the children. The second is more symbolic, closer to a metaphor even within the story. To quote Harrison again: “Telepathy in fiction is often a metaphor for communication, for empathy, for an open style of human relationship.”

For ‘thinking-together’ is set against a society predicated on conformity. (“The more stupid they are, the more like everyone else they think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want to hurt people who are different.”) Labrador becomes a caricature of the ordered, rule-bound world of the Fifties, of strictly enforced dress codes and table manners, where the over-riding requirement is to fit in.

And further to Harrison telepathy is also something of a metaphor for the reading experience, symbols placed in your head across a distance, showing you things as others see them, accessing what can feel like a higher level of space. And it can feel that others who don’t seem to get the same experience from reading as we do are in some way missing a sense, are mere norms.

”Condemned to negatives”

As with ’Slan’, the narrator occupies different ages as the novel progresses, giving different ages groups their own opportunity to plug in. And the notion that they equalled stasis while we represented change, that went on to become a very counter-culture concept. The Jefferson Airplane song ’Crown Of Creation’ (1968) wasn’t just inspired by the book, most of its lyrics were barely modified quotes from it. To them it meant generation-war militancy. While its argument may boil down to a credo coined by Frank Zappa: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”

But other readings were available. Philip Womack, writing in the Guardian, said:

“I first read ‘The Chrysalids’ when I was 12, an age when any child is beginning to wonder about where he or she fits into the world…. Wyndham's evocation of David's ability… left me reeling with envy and desire; I remember sitting in the library, ‘sending out’ thoughts in the hope that someone, somewhere might catch them.”

The novel’s predicated on breaking away from your elders and their narrow world. David’s parents are the wicked step-parents of fairy tales, in every way apart from them literally being step-parents. They beat him if he’s bad, and lecture him not to be bad if he’s not currently being bad. In general, bar one kindly Uncle, the adult characters only exist insofar as they intrude on the young’s lives, a sense enhanced by the first-person narrative. Which may well be the way you do view adult authority figures when young.

Plus the Fringes provide an evil Uncle, effectively giving us two versions of ‘bad Dad’. They make up the types of Abraham and Cronos, the authoritarian unyielding rule-giver and the malevolent monster who’d destroy his son to steal his girlfriend from him. At twelve we might be more wary of Abraham, feeling these confines are strictures are there to mould us into his own image, prevent us growing into our own person. And notably it’s the older David who encounters the evil Uncle.

Further, when young we often do lead a double life which in a way makes us two selves, acting differently at home with our parents to out with our peers. And it can be easy to imagine one is your true unsullied self, the other an act.

So life in Labrador is in upshot presented as entirely and explicitly negative, a place to flee:

“We had a gift, a sense which should have been a blessing but which was little more than a curse. The stupidest norm was happier; he could feel that he belonged. We did not, and because we did not we had no positive - we were condemned to negatives, to not revealing ourselves, to not speaking when we would, to not using what we know, to not being found out - to a life of perpetual deception, concealment and lying. The prospect of continued negativeness stretching out ahead.”

The early section of the novel read like a ticking clock, a countdown to when they’ll need to go on the run. Whereupon they have to stay ahead of pursuers while awaiting the arrival of Sealand, a telepathic community they’ve managed to make contact with. So Sealand give regular status updates on their rescue, a cross between the Seventh Cavalry and Deliveroo. And in these communications it’s specified how superior Sealand feel to mere norms.

When they do show up, inevitably for the finale, it’s effectively in the form of a UFO. Which again seems uncannily prescient of imagery running through hippie culture, the “silver spaceships” of Neil Young’s ’After The Gold Rush’, the tall Venusians of David Bowie’s ’Memory of a Free Festival’ or (them again) Jefferson Airplane’s ’Have You Seen the Saucers?’ (all 1970).

Their weapon to subdue the norms is a petrifying web, surely a metaphor for the rigidities of their stifling culture. Which might at first appear a mere incapacitant, the humane method of a superior culture. The equivalent of the Tomorrow People’s stun guns, weapons without violence. But this seems done just to later inform us its effects are fatal.

The final chapter’s then given over to the Sealand woman justifying this, in a not dissimilar way to Dr. Vorless calling time on morality in ’Triffids’. Her argument seems to boil down to “it’s okay to kill a thing already dying”. In one of the passages quoted by Jefferson Airplane, she says: “in loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.” The seemingly tangential ‘fighting cocks’ cover, not a thing which appears in the book, is presumably designed to represent this. And notably, the one good Norm - kindly Uncle Axel, who would make a more inconvenient corpse, disappears from the narrative before his point.

And, as we may be used to by now, this homo superior business is justified by reference to teleological evolution:

“Did you ever hear of the great lizards? When the time came for them to be superseded they had to pass away.”

The argument is not “there was conflict, the situation became them or us”. The argument is, and quite specifically, “this evolutionary path ain’t big enough for the both of us.” Which, frankly, seems less evolution than eugenics. For one thing, the dinosaurs most likely died as a result of a cosmic accident rather than some grand plan, and besides some reptiles - including fairly big ones - survived to this day. Life on Earth is made of a combination of ancient and more recent species, like you’d expect. For deviation from the norm does not in fact necessitate killing the norm. But the unspoken element of her argument is “we get to say what is dying.”

Which is not something unusual with the Pariah Elites trope. As we saw, in Sturgeon’s ‘More Than Human’, a human character who serves a similarly thwarting plot function is casually killed just to sweep her off-stage. But here the dead don’t even get counted. It’s not the most fannish but the most mainstream instance of this trope which is the most indifferent to loss of life, as soon as it can be labelled ‘norm’ or ’old’.

This sense of generational conflict as something perpetual and innate in human society, it’s very reminiscent of the Futurist manifesto. The Sealand woman’s explanation that one day they too will be replaced finds it’s fore-echo in 1909:

“When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts..! They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and… will hurl themselves forward to kill us. ...And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.”

And like the Futurist manifesto you can’t deny the heady excitement of the appeal. While being at the same time aware that this is Social Darwinism speaking.

This was the bullet ’The Tomorrow People’ had wished away through a conspicuous display of performative niceness. ("We're superior, we just don't like to say so.") ’The Chrysalids’ takes it head-on, effectively painting a target on its own chest. And it doesn’t help in the slightest. We just move straight on, as if it hadn't happened, to get to the happy ending.

The very concept of ‘thinking-together’, which binds the book, bakes this in. We can communicate at a higher level, go on to create a better form of living. But not with you. It seems likely that one of the main reasons to give this book its foreign setting was to avoid showing the menfolk of a quaint English village getting it in the neck. The counter-culture notion that we can frolic off into a perfect future, just as soon as we’ve bumped off those troublesome squares, that was already there in 1955.

‘MORE THAN HUMAN’ BY THEODORE STURGEON

(Another instalment of Pariah Elites, with another set of PLOT SPOILERS. Series begins here.)

“What is it called when a person needs a… person… and the two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?”

”I Is All of Us”

Alfred Bester, as we've seen, tended to not just set his stories in the future but one stuffed with SF paraphernalia. But, see buddy, he’d write in regular Americanese, to keep things, y’know, rooted for the reader. Theodore Sturgeon does something like the opposite. He less frequently uses future or interplanetary settings. But what’s nominally this world always feels less Science Fiction than Fantasy. Everything - language, characterisation, events - is heightened to the degree that they feel set somewhere else. Which is never the other side of the board to us, more a chess move away.

His style is rich without being florid. He places regular words in unusual contexts, so they catch your attention. ’More Than Human’ (1953), often rated as his best work, has this as its opening paragraph:

“The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.”

Sturgeon’s also adept at the slow-burn reveal. Rather than than provide a series of flourishy, out-the-hat ‘revelations’ he expects the reader to pick up on his hints and nods. The classic example here would be the ‘special’ nature of his cast. (Though admittedly the title helps more than a little.) Ten years after ’Slan’, it’s written on the assumption the reader will know these tropes, and doesn’t need them to be reiterated.

However, in ’Slan’, in in ‘The X-Men’, in ‘Tomorrow People’, the fact that we readers don’t have the heroes’ powers is treated as something of a triviality, best overlooked. Because really those powers just symbolise our ‘specialness’, psi abilities standing for smarts and so on. Besides, who’s to say we won’t evolve into them one day?

Whereas here, in perhaps the book’s most unique feature, there’s little attempt to make the ‘special’ characters sympathetic. They’re not necessarily audience identification figures, just who we happen to find ourselves with.

The idiot who starts off the book in the quote above (later named Lone) is telegraphed as being the very opposite of the standard super-smart slan. We’re told he’s composed of “many lacks… lacks, rather than inadequacies, things he could not do and would never be able to do.” His attitude to human society is one of uncomprehending indifference. Meeting him on the page isn’t so far from what meeting him in real life would be. Too remote for any real attachment, you end up just watching what he does. ‘Idiot’ is used in the original sense, of idiosyncratic, being beyond communication. (“A creature so lacking in empathy, who himself had never laughed and never snarled and so could not comprehend the feelings of his gay or angry followers.”)

While Janie is the epitome of the witchy child, whose strange behaviour so spooks adults. She uses her special powers to play tricks on two toddlers, and when that leads to their getting a parental whipping shows no remorse. When they mount a revenge attack she realises they have powers of their own, and straight away decides to ally with them.

As we’ll (hopefully) get on to, John Wyndham took two books to play this trope both ways up, with the para-humans as persecuted minority and as hostile invasion force. Sturgeon shows little interest in either. His para-humans are more alien, yes, but less other-worldly and more… well, alien. Human concerns are not theirs, and so humans are of little interest to them.

With this trope powers are usually plus, as in the term extra-sensory. Telepaths can either speak or think to others, just as they choose. Here despite the title they’re less “more than” and much nearer to other, as if making a different choice. They have senses we don’t have, but lack the ones we do. In ‘The Stars My Destination’, Foyle’s feral nature was seem as an irony given his abilities. Here it seems contingent.

Further, and unlike everything else we’ve seen so far save the X-Men (who won’t appear for another decade after this), each ‘special’ has their own unique power. And that’s then taken a step further. For this is the way “more than” does come into the narrative, and it’s numerical…

These para-humans blesh, which is defined as “group… the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” And it’s this, not those individual powers, which is the crucial distinction. We’re not dealing with Homo Superior but Homo Gestalt. Described by Baby to Janie: “He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you [Lone] are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.” (‘Head’ seems to mean something like ‘central node’.)

As the ‘brain’, Baby is less a character than a plot device. In ’Tomorrow People’, Tim is ostensibly a computer, but actually one of the characters. Baby is the reverse, essentially a human super-computer who can only be contacted via intermediaries. The reader never hears from him directly.

Bleshing is later elaborated on. “That was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everybody all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing,’ but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.”

And this was quite an audacious thing to write at the height of the Cold War, where the good guys were defined by their commitment to individualism and the bad guys the dehumanising evils of collectivism. It’s notable how many of the covers to this book portray the more-thans as something alien and menacing, contrary to the way they’re actually described.

Or, to look at it more closely… Fans, naturally enough, prized finding other fans and hanging out with them. Slang terms such as ‘slan shack’ (for a group house of fans) evolved for this purpose. And this was more true in pre-internet days, when such things required more effort. But they also very much prize individualism. They’re more like innately solitary creatures which are drawn to one another, while actual encounters are fraught with danger, with rival Bradbury and Asimov fans likely to fall into a blazing row at any moment.

However, it doesn’t read as though Sturgeon’s intent is to pillory the ‘fans are Slans’ trope, even if he wouldn’t have written this book without all that. It’s more that he takes it as his impetus. He asks “what if this thing happened, what if some really were more than human?”, and follows the thought where it takes him.

He said later: “The Gestalt relationship has preoccupied me for so long - the concept of a whole entity made up of very discrete individuals who don't lose their individuality. Gestalt between people is not like an army or a fascist dictatorship where everybody does what he's told. It's not an idea or particular creed that people have or share. It's what they are.”

So, rather than flatter us fans for our superiority the novel’s purposely written on the basis that we are the unbleshed, and when we read of bleshing we essentially bump against a conceptual glass wall. In fact, even among the para-humans there’s a lot more space space devoted to them not bleshing than bleshing.

The book’s compiled from three novellas, linked but not sequenced together, making it a kind of montage. Many is the review which sourly notes that the book’s about a unity between characters, but is so fractured in the way it’s written. The same people probably complain that in ’Turn of the Screw’ the narrator is unreliable…

In ’Demolished Man’, Bester gave us dual (not to mention duelling) protagonists, an audacious step for genre fiction which tends to spotlight the hero. Whereas Sturgeon gives us what’s essentially three protagonists, one for each novella, and no sense which we’re supposed to take as the main one.

There are plenty of plot lines which do come together, and with a satisfying click. But overall its a series of parts which don’t make up a complete picture, which only alludes to a greater whole. Sturgeon often showed an interest in music and these work like musical motifs, sometimes working in isolation, sometimes combining.

Furthermore, each of the three sections does bring the story forward. But, as we start them, we’re thrown back into a state of uncertainty, dropped off somewhere new and left to get our own bearings. The text switches between first and third person narration without explanation, at one point switches between different first person narrators. It’s elliptical, if not fragmentary. The failing of memory is made a major theme. And this is our seeing what it is to blesh, but only from the outside.

Children, They Grow

One key way in which the trope is assumed is that the powers’ basis are never explained, but assumed to be associated with youth. It’s only Lone whose parents we don’t see, and in all cases they’re ‘normal’. There’s a strong element of another trope which often coincides, of free-range children, where you get to live in a den in the woods with all your mates, away from those uptight order-issuing adults.

With few crowd scenes or background characters, the cast list is relatively light. And adults are commonly shown as confining, restrictive and - ultimately - limiting. The first we encounter, Mr. Kew, is a fulminating puritan who keeps his daughters locked up against the evils of the world. But his eldest, Evelyn, gets something of a psychic homing signal to meet Lone, and vice versa. (It’s unspecified, but presumably she’s more-than too.) The quote up top is from her.

Though this is a boy-meets-girl moment, instead of bonking they bond. (“The currents of their inner selves surged between them.”) But the laid-on Spring setting associates this with new birth. And in a more symbolic sense this is where the hybrid is begat. The other characters are introduced from that point on, and in age order.

Though one of those ‘children’ is Lone himself, who’s taken in by the Prodds. A kindly old couple, the most likeable ‘parents’ we come across, they feel more like indulgent grandparents. (“We’ll raise him up just like a child” confirms Mrs Prodd.) Farmers, they take on a role somewhere between Ma and Pa Kent and the blind old man in ’Frankenstein’. It’s they who teach Lone to speak, and more generally to consider others. (When he first takes the other more-thans in, it’s the image of Mrs Prodd which compels him.) Lone spends eight years with them, which might seem an un-necessarily long period until we realise the children are growing up in real time.

And when they do gather together, as often with the feral children trope, they take on a form of the family they’re ostensibly escaping. Lone’s the father, Janie the Mother, the Twins the kids and the knowledge-dispensing but immobile Baby an age-inverted Grandfather.

This is disrupted in the second novella with the (off-stage) death of Lone. New character Gerry, realising he can’t replace him as head, takes them to Evelyn’s sister to be looked after. But in the meantime Alicia (as was) has become Miss Kew, who “looked a lot older than she was, because she held her mouth so tight”. She constantly corrects their grammar, tells them to “stand up straight” and enforces regimented mealtimes. Her name may well be a subliminal antonym for ‘askew’, representing all that’s correct yet wrong.

Against which Gerry brings sullen adolescence into the equation, describing himself as “ninety per cent short-circuited potentials and ten per cent juvenile delinquent.” (Not at all like those well-behaved Tomorrow People.) Realising their lives in this new situation are comfortable but unbleshable, he kills her.

All this is told in, as you might guess, a fragmentary fashion as Gerry visits a psychiatrist in order to recall it all. And framing it this way bounces us into seeing it psychologically, characters in terms of symbols rather than human life. The rather reasonable question “why kill her, why not just leave?” goes unasked. The details of the murder are not just glossed over, their glossing over is itself spelt out.

Miss Kew had to die because of what she represented. If ’Demolished Man’ was a psychological thriller, this is a psychological story. Events might occur, but just as incidences of mental states.

”Powers of Recovery”

The third novella shifts to a character who has up to that point only been mentioned once. Hip, like Lone, is incomplete, asocial and uncommunicative. And like Lone, he’s raised up just like a baby, this time by Janie. So this takes the form of a coming-of-age tale, out of child-like immediacy…

“His afternoons began to possess a morning and his days a yesterday. He tried to remember a bench they had used, a theatre they had attended, and he would lead the way back. She relinquished her guidance as fast as he would take it up until it was he who planned their days.”

But we discover he’s had his memories wiped by Gerry, out of a combination of preserving the gestalt’s secrecy and pure malice. So this follows a similar structure to Gerry’s novella, with Janie as the psychiatrist and he the recovering patient. (“Janie demanded nothing. She only… she only waited.”) Hip is not growing, so much as rediscovering.

We also find out that, even if he can use some of its powers, Gerry has led the hybrid away from bleshing - supposedly the thing he killed Miss Kew over. His “unsullied ego” prevents him getting the thing that ego desires. So they’re not back in the woodland den, but in the abandoned house of Miss Kew’s father, grandiose and monstrous, described as “a great sick mouth” with furniture “so heavy it has never been moved.” Without Janie, Baby is silent to him.

It’s also significant that in the very first novella, Gerry and Hip are introduced adjacently, which sets us up to compare and contrast them from the start. Pre-life-hiatus, Hip was self-confessedly “arrogant, self-assured, shallow”. Losing what he had and getting it back doesn’t just restore him to where he was, it changes him.

It’s sort of strangely impressive that the finale hinges so closely on the distinction between morality and ethics. Not exactly the sort of thing which is focus group tested. While ethics are worked out from first principles, we’re told, morality is when these become codified into binding rules. It’s true that this breaks a rule very commonly associated with morality, that there must be ‘the guilty’ and they must be punished.

But, solving everything by staging a philosophical argument seems reminiscent of the ending to the original ‘Quatermass’, where the solution is to ask the monster if its ever considered being nice. Something which seems to stem from the pre-internet-message-board era.

Plus, me being a materialist type, I’m not keen on the notion that morality is some abstract code which we are taught, rather than something which exists in real-world instances. And if that is the distinction between it and ethics, then quite frankly we only need one of these.

(As we’re rather abruptly told of Lone’s demise, which we never witness but are only told about by the other guy, I had been wondering if he wouldn’t make a surprise reappearance, demanding to know “who’s been bossing in my head?” And I’m not sure I don’t prefer that as an ending.)

But there may be a better way to see it. It could be seen a a story of two adolescents, one of which is able to reach emotional maturity. Lone was lacking, his concerns only immediate. Replace him as the head and wider questions come into frame. Gerry responds to these like an adolescent with powers, who can no longer be told what to do by Miss Kew but has no meaningful notions of his own. While Hip hits upon maturity. And we discover that, before then, the gestalt never truly bleshed.

I See No “I See No Colour”

Bester mentions in passing a black Esper recruit, able to enter a door which whites can’t, bucking the prejudices of his day. Sturgeon makes more of this. He puts reference to the colour of the twins only in the mouths of white racists, it being a matter of indifference to the other more-thans. But first he uses another reader tip-off, not just making their father a janitor (a typically black job to have) but giving him the exaggerated ‘black’ voice of his time. He never quite says “yessuh Mistah Bossman”, but it comes close.

Further, what commonly passed for anti-racism in this era was putting black characters in peripheral roles, thereby granting the nice white characters the chance to demonstrate their enlightened attitudes. And this is somewhat cemented here. The twins say no more that “oop”, “eee” and “hey-ho”, even though they have aged like everyone else. It’s trying to be better, true. But the trying shows up the failing.

Overall… as said in earlier instalments you could recommend van Vogt only to SF fans, but Bester to a the general reader. Sturgeon, in a sense, works only for a similarly narrow group, but quite a different one. It’s the reader willing to actually read, who’ll pay close attention, ask questions, fill in gaps, sometimes skip back over earlier passages. And for some of us it’s refreshing to be trusted to do this, to be treated as adults. It feels kind of special…

Coming soon! More of this Pariah Elites business...

‘THE STARS MY DESTINATION’ BY ALFRED BESTER

More on Pariah Elites in SF, and more on Alfred Bester, the well-known 1956 work. Again with the PLOT SPOILERS. First part here, more to follow…

“I’ve been a tiger all my life. I trained myself.. educated myself… pulled myself up by my stripes to make me a stronger tiger with a longer claw and a sharper tooth… quick and deadly… I went too far. I went beyond simplicity. I turned myself into a thinking creature.”

The Jaunte Age

The googly ball Alfred Bester tossed into ’Demolished Man’, as we’ve already seen, was telepathy. And telepaths do turn up, if in limited number, in the later ’The Stars My Destination’. But overall, this is the turn of teleportation. The jolly term ‘jaunting’, later taken up by ‘The Tomorrow People’, seems to stem from here.

And this becomes determining. It reads like a much more improvised book than its predecessor, Bester’s mind zipping from one crazy notion to the next as quickly as his ever-jaunting characters. ’Demolished Man’ had a primary setting, even if it left it at will. ’Stars My Destination’ bounces round the map. It’s way more about generating headlong forward trajectory than planting ground beneath your feet. (Typical line: “She broke away from him and swept across the ballroom floor. At that moment the first bombs fell.”) Yet, however bizarrely, the book’s also thick with foreshadowing, and has quite a strong thematic unity.

There’s two peculiarities; first, the way the origin of jaunting is consigned to a prologue. We’re shown the point in our future where the first jaunt happens. Yet it’s presented as an innate human ability, neither dependent on technological advances nor evolutionary leaps. The assumption is that threat stimulates innovation, as the first jaunter hits upon it to save his life. Yet do threats to life not exist in the here and now? The book spends absolutely no time pondering this question.

What’s important is that jaunting isn’t some potent of the ascent of homo superior, but a testament to the power of the survival instinct, technobabbled as to do with “Tigrid substance in nerve cells.” If not an evolutionary leap, it revolutionises society, the consequences are social. (“There were crashes and panics and strikes and famines as pre-jaunte industries failed.”)

Also, in a particularly exquisite detail, the rich carry on using antiquated tools - telephones, coach-and-horses, servants forbidden to jaunt themselves etc. - simply because they can, much like affected toffs today such as Jacob Rees Mogg parade their wealth though affected antiquation.

Tattooed On the Inside

The backdrop is the Solar War, between the Inner Planets and Outer Satellites. Which, not unusual in American SF, is presented as such an anti-imperialist war its almost a class war, fought between the labouring poor and decadent rich. Yet the striving Outer Satellite folk scarcely appear. Their contribution is to continually lob stuff over the dividing wall of what’s in and out of the novel, by their repeated but unexpected missile attacks, sometimes upon ballrooms.

And this is largely to focus those features on protagonist Gully Foyle.

Foyle is functionally much like Powell, the hero of the previous book. His aim is to take down his powerful and well-connected nemesis, Presteign, who left him to die in a wrecked spaceship. And in this mission he travels (not infrequently jauntes) through society, taking in both high and low. There’s the same device of chapters focusing on one or the other of them, with the other then appearing only externally. He also turns out to have a special ability akin to Powell’s, more of which anon… 

But he’s nothing like good cop Powell in character. With all this future tech thrown against him, his defence is essentially his single-mindedness. When he breaks out of the warren of tunnels making up the underground prison of Gouffre Martel, it feels emblematic. This future society is a maze, of conventions and expectations, through which he drives a remorselessly straight path.

Which actually makes him less like the hero and more the villain of ’Demolished Man’. Like Reich, Foyle is not just outside but against society, relying on his own gut instinct to get where he wants. But then Reich wasn’t simply the villain nor is Foyle simply our hero. The polyglot nature of the novel and its refusal to set a moral centre seem related.

At the outset he’s living hand-to-mouth on a wrecked spaceship, a scavenging animal. Then on a foraging raid, he sees a reflection of himself, like an animal having a brief experience of self-awareness. And this is associated with his spying a rescue ship. He is, until that point, willing to survive from day to day until he doesn’t. But when the Presteign-owned ship fails to stop for him he vows revenge, which necessitates escape.

A common feature of pulp heroes is that they express themselves entirely through action. Yet, though he surely was a pulp writer, Bester was pretty much uninterested in heroics. To him, struggles to change things often fail, or cause their own problems. And what may seem like a standard Campbellian ‘overcoming the refusal of the call’ moment is portrayed quite clearly as a mistake. He’s likened to a “beast in the trap” in the first sentence of the first chapter. And that trap widens, into his all-consuming lust for revenge. Had he died in that tool locker, and subsequent events gone unwritten, it would simply have gone better.

True Bester may be having it both ways a touch. There’s times when we’re clearly meant to thrill to Foyle’s acts of derring-do. And his act of rape isn’t seen in a particularly serious light, presented as little more than a character flaw. (Treatment of women… well, we had that last time.) But we’re also made aware that we’re spending much of our time in the company of an emotionally stunted creature who we’d shun in real life, tattooed face or otherwise. 

He’s described alternately, and by those who known him best, as a “brute”, “beast”, “savage”, “ox”, “thing”, “dirt”, “dregs”, “bastard”, “Cro-Magnon”, “caveman”, “ghoul”, “walking cancer” and “a damned tattooed tiger”. (I could have easily missed some.)

Yes, the tattoo… Bester conveys his characters through SF-sized symbols. Robin is a ‘telesend’, with telepathically sends out thoughts but cannot receive them, making her near-on incapable of lying. Dagenham, a dangerous enemy, is literally radioactive, to the point you can only be near him for so long. His ship is yellow-and-black, like a hazard sign. And so on. Foyle has his failing literally written on his face via his tiger-stripe tattoo, where even removing it doesn’t really remove it. (It flushes back as soon as his bloods’ up.)

This mark gets utilised on most of the book covers. And Neil Gaiman, writing an outro to the edition I read, is right to say that the British title of 'Tiger! Tiger!’ is more effective. The other title, in its boldly going, is more Captain Kirk than Alfred Bester. The via-Blake British version is about a thing you cannot help but admire, but wouldn’t want to be near, and for the very same reasons.

But then…

“Without Mercy, Without Forgiveness, Without Hypocrisy”

For much of the time we might imagine that if Foyle started out somewhere beneath us, he will ascend to our level. The tiger that learns first to plan then think like a man, he’ll swap his stripes for morality before the final chapter’s out. In fact, Bester probably leads us to believe that, then shows him accelerating past us. Foyle is not one of us nerds soon to be seen in our true form, no longer needing to hide or conform, the way Jommy was in ’Slan’.

There’s so much talk of space jaunting being impossible, we figure it’ll be along. But when it happens, he’s able to time jaunte too. (Perhaps based on Einsteinian notions of space/time?) And while land jaunting merely shook up the economy, space jaunting is a total paradigm shift.

Interestingly, this occupies the same formal space in the narrative as Reich’s vision, and has the same sense of dark revelation. Except Reich’s universe essentially closes in on him. Whereas Foyle effectively expands to fill his. He starts the book in a tool locker, and ends it jaunting throughout the cosmos, to the point he’s become virtually omnipotent.

And the typographical effects which peppered ’Demolished Man’, but so far withheld here, suddenly appear like never before. Bester could have formatted those earlier efforts on his home typewriter, by playing with the page margins. Whereas here they’re vivid word shapes, like something from a Russian Futurist poem, calligraphy representing onomatopoeia representing synaesthesia. (It also seems remarkably close to the sort of formal experimentation the New Wave in SF went in for, a decade later.)

And what triggers this ability in Foyle is his being caught in an explosion, so he is simultaneously everywhere and trapped in pain. In fact, the two then become almost indistinguishable. (“”He was not only trapped within the labyrinth of the inferno; he was trapped in the kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses.”) The ‘burning man’ images, which people see as foreshadows of him in this moment, have something sacrificial about them - which makes him almost Christ-like. And this is enhanced by the way we’re not with Foyle in this moment, but see him through the eyes of secondary characters.

But it’s also wider than that, the mythological notion of creation coming through an act of primal sacrifice. And, though Bester forever leaps from one crazy notion to the next, I tend to think this is deliberate. Foyle becomes an example of what’s sometimes called the bestial celestial, where the high is to be found in the low and vice versa. It’s not savage to messiah but Savage Messiah. (His voice emits “burning laughter.”)

And, as you’re probably used to by now, Bester then throws in something else. PyreX is a explosive device which can be triggered by the power of thought alone. We’re told several times it’s pronounced like funeral pyre, which feels a little like rubbing the point in. In a fairly unabashed nuclear bomb analogy, whichever side has it wins the war.

And Foyle’s solution isn’t to ban the bomb but decentralise control. Do not think Gully Foyle comes to bring peace on Earth. In fact he’s not even packing a sword, but a shedload of dangerous explosive, then handing each one of us a fuse. 

Everyone having their own access to such powers of destruction, that would be pushing it even for the NRA. But in this sink-or-swim approach to parenting, he seems largely unconcerned about the outcome. There’s no guarantee it will turn out well, and not much sign he cares. The human race will either make it or they won’t. That’s up to us, not Gully Foyle. (“No more secrets from now on… No more telling the children what’s best for them to know… Let ‘em all grow up. It’s about time.”)

And the self-contradictory notion of primal sacrifice extends to here. The PyreX is hidden in a secret religious altar, while Presteign compares it to creation. There’s even the suggestion that PyreX and space-hopping Foyle are equivalents, dark revelations which we may not want to acknowledge but won’t be able to shut out. There’s a prelude to this when Presteign’s daughter Olivia, perceiving a missile attack on Earth through her electromagnetic and infra-red sight, is rapturous:

”the explosions… they’re not just clouds of light. They’re fabrics, webs, tapestries of meshing colours. So beautiful. Like exquisite shrouds.”

Though some of the price paid is narrative coherence. Up to now, everything has centred around Foyle’s feud with Presteign. Their first confrontation happens off-page. Then they meet while Foyle is in disguise. We feel things are being saved up for a final conflict, a page-turner punch-up perhaps atop some space-age Reichenbach Falls. Yet while the two do come face-to-face in the final chapter, it’s with several other characters present, who essentially elbow him to the margins. The central conflict, the novel’s driving force is essentially forgotten about.

Which seems par for the course. If better-known than ’Demolished Man’, this book is considerably less focused. While that had digressions this sometimes feels *all* digressions, pulpily episodic and strung together with frequent daredevil last-minute escapes. Robyn’s line “I’m thinking all over the place” seems apposite. If we were snarky types we’d be calling it ’The Stars My Deviation’. 

In what’s both boon and curse there’s simply too many ideas here, jostling against one another for the spotlight. The upside of this is, much as van Vogt had been, Bester is able to disgorge his febrile imagination onto the page. The downside is that one notion never stays uppermost for long. I’m always fascinated how so many pulp-era SF writers work as if for a graphic novel, throwing new visual and conceptual notions at you in a seemingly endless series. (Bester essentially invents bullet time, decades ahead of *’The Matrix’,* despite it being so visual an effect.)

But out of this cavalcade, what will stay with you? I’m quite sure it will be the ending, the savage messiah making the primal sacrifice, crucified and yet omnipotent.