War of the Worlds
TV adaptation that brings sci-fi to the Home Counties
Woking lies in ruins. Surrey is a battle zone raked by sizzling death rays, inundated with suffocating black smoke, patrolled by lumbering war machines. Its population, once comfortable in their villas and pubs and golf course clubhouses, are refugees, running for their lives.
In most screen treatments of HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897), the Martians land in America. The 1953 movie plants its alien cylinders near San Diego. The 2005 Steven Spielberg film sends its invaders to New Jersey, taking its lead from the notorious panic-inducing Orson Welles radio version of the Thirties. When the new BBC One three-part adaptation begins on Sunday night, it will follow its predecessors by dispensing with Wells’s rather featureless hero and inventing new protagonists of its own. But it will be the first to relocate the Martians to carry out the task for which they were created – to smash the English Home Counties to pieces.
“When HG Wells moved to Woking, he’d just left his first wife for a young woman called Amy,” explains its screenwriter Peter Harness, who also scripted the magical drama Jonathan
Strange & Mr Norrell and a Doctor Who story about shape-shifting aliens lurking in a Brixton playground. “The relationship caused a lot of controversy, and they’d gone to hide out in the suburbs – in an insular neighbourhood where he felt oppressed and p----- off. He probably thought it would be fun to lay waste to it through the agency of soulless Martian invaders.”
Wells’s 1934 autobiography seems to confirm these suspicions. “I wheeled about the district,” he recalled, “marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians.”
Terrestrial forces have since removed some of the more surprising Surrey features he catalogued in the 1890s – a squatter’s camp with its huts and potato patches; the Oriental Institute, founded by the Anglohungarian scholar Gottlieb Leitner, where Victorian undergraduates studied Sanskrit and Urdu. The sandy lanes cycled by Wells are also lost beneath tarmac and concrete. But it remains possible to get on your bike and follow his tracks.
Pyrford Church still stands, where the narrator of The War of the Worlds hears the bells peal 12, and watches the midnight sky burn with lurid green light. The domes of the Shah Jahan mosque, Britain’s first purpose-built place of Islamic worship, are perfectly intact, despite a direct hit from an alien heat ray. The Princess pub on Woking’s Maybury Road remains open for business – the model for Wells’s Spotted Dog, whose landlord hires his horse and cart to the narrator, then has his neck broken by the claws of a
Martian tripod. (Generously, Woking has repaid these fantasies by erecting a 23ft war machine on Crown Square, which strides in the direction of the Big Apple bowling alley.)
The Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee once remarked that encountering monsters in outer space was a lot less alarming than discovering “a yeti sitting on the loo in Tooting Bec”.
It’s a lesson learnt from Wells. Geographical specificity is one of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal. When interplanetary war finds its battlefield in Leatherhead and Chipping Ongar, it reminds us of history’s long habit of promoting obscure provincial places to the headlines. (How many of the novel’s first readers, I wonder, had heard of the Belgian cities of Mons and Ypres?) By the time the action of the novel has moved to London, we’re in the middle of a full-blown refugee crisis. The machines are on the march, flooding the English landscape with poison gas. Profiteers gather at the Pool of London, ready to evacuate high-paying fugitives in overcrowded boats. A six million-strong human stampede begins, surging through the avenues and crescents of Richmond, Ealing, Wimbledon, towards the Essex coast. “Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together,” Wells tells us. “It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.”
A modern reader coming across this passage might imagine England transformed into a kind of Syria. The book’s original public would have recalled the Franco-prussian War chaos. But Wells encouraged them to do something more daring – to see the methods of the Martians as a reflection of the British imperial project. “The Tasmanians,” he observed, “were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of 50 years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” His argument was not for kindness. Wells was a fervent eugenicist who believed in the survival of the fittest and the managed eradication of the rest. Hollywood, with no interest in this aspect of the book, found its own allegories. The 1953 film was fuelled by the Cold War, the Spielberg version by the post-9/11 War on Terror. But the new BBC adaptation reconnects the story to its source. It depicts imperial Britain getting a taste of its own medicine. Some have already choked on their dose. After the first episode was previewed at the British Film Institute, The Sun clutched its pearls at a “woke War of the Worlds” that “attacks religion and the British Empire and highlights climate change”.
Wells, an advocate of socialist world government who believed that Christianity was dying like “stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide”, would have been amused but not surprised. He lived long enough to know he had bequeathed the culture a language in which to articulate its fears of the future. When Marconi set up radio masts at Poldhu Cove in Cornwall, they were compared to Martian fighting machines. When, in 1907, stories circulated that scientists were developing an electric beam that could detonate enemy shells before they were fired, the press invoked the
Martian heat-ray. When, in 1910, the editor of the Forfar Herald urged the council to construct a tunnel system to shelter the population from German bombardment, The War of the Worlds furnished the hot apocalyptic imagery.
The new TV version is freighted with this history – and with the implicit invitation to use it to interpret our own future. “Wells clearly sees that religion and nationalism and the self-mythology of a country can just crumble in a minute in the face of superior technology,” says Peter Harness. The
War of the Worlds watches it fall.
At the beginning of the second episode, we hear a rousing speech from the British Minister for War. “Our cavalry, our cannon are the best in the world,” he declares, as the camera cuts to a series of horribly familiar images. A wilderness of blasted trees. British Tommies running, burning, helpless. Surrey transfigured into the Somme.
The War of the Worlds begins on BBC One on Sunday at 9pm
In the novel, refugees surge through the avenues and crescents of Richmond, Ealing and Wimbledon