Return to Mars

Captain W.E. Johns Return to Mars (1955)
A thoroughly good egg of military credentials, and his son - also spiffing - are engaged in a manly hike across Scotland when they find themselves inconvenienced by a spot of rain. They take shelter in an outhouse, and are then discovered by the owner of the outhouse - an eccentric boffin who has been working on his own spaceship, a craft resembling one of those so-called flying saucers. Naturally, the egghead recruits this lucky pair of complete strangers as companions to accompany him on the maiden flight of the Spacemaster, as it is called.

Thus began Johns' Kings of Space to which this is the sequel. Johns, as you may recall, wrote a million novels about the adventures of Biggles, another thoroughly good egg of military credentials. I'm only familiar with Biggles through the many parodies he has inspired, and so I had certain expectations of this one - some of which have been born out, although most have lain fallow.

The novel's initial tendency to reel off statistics of astronomy and physics suggests didactic motives and the influence of either Asimov or Clarke; oddly though, I get the impression that while Johns may have recalled a few science lessons at a very good school, and may even have attended a jolly interesting lecture at the village hall some years before, he seemingly felt that he otherwise knew as much as anyone really needed to know, and so forged ahead without too much time wasted on research. So the novel freewheels a lot whilst nevertheless bristling its moustache as one might expect.

A man of tremendous energy, as small men often are, he had had a great deal of experience in the tropics of disorders caused by instincts, malaria, sandfly fever, and the like. A feature of his nature was a sense of humour that could make a joke out of trouble. He also possessed, often to the Professor's bewilderment, a wonderful vocabulary of RAF slang. When Tiger had put the project before him, asking him if he would attend some patients on Mars, he had, not surprisingly accused him of being "round the bend."

Watch out, everyone! That Toby is a loose fucking cannon!

Despite the sort of level-headed temperament from which such words were born, it seems Johns was a sucker for pseudoscience, using the novel as a means of speculating upon the origin of flying saucers, invoking the alleged destruction of Atlantis, and telepathy as something we are only just beginning to understand.

Tiger frowned. 'I'm not so sure of that. People think more about these things than they used to. Governments, fearing a panic, may have made light of Flying Saucers and tried to account for them in all sorts of ridiculous ways. But nowadays the public are not so easily fooled, and a lot of people believe in them.'

Whilst the saucer phenomena was still in its first decade at the time of writing, scepticism regarding the same was similarly in its infancy, from what I can tell. Even so, John's position - either open-minded or gullible depending on how you look at it - has surprised me, as has most of the novel. The story and situations are fucking ludicrous - it being a children's book written for a generation of good little soldiers - and yet it holds together through being surprisingly well written and espousing none of the usual colonial attitudes one might associate with its vintage. If anything, Return to Mars seems relatively progressive in carrying a vaguely ecological message and even referring directly to the benefits of a welfare state. There's only one girl in the whole thing and she doesn't have a lot to say, but I suppose at least she isn't making tea, sewing or being conspicuously demure. Most unexpected is that Johns occasionally achieves poetic insight beyond the requirements of the genre, as when Rex encounters his first alien.

 

This was altogether different; an event so tremendous, so deeply moving that it awoke in him sensations not to be described in words. For there were no words to fit the case. He felt it was not true. He wanted to tell himself that this simply wasn't true. But he knew it was true. And he knew he wasn't dreaming. Here before him was the answer to the age-old question: were the people of Earth alone in the universe? They were not. What would be the effect of those three simple words on Earth when people knew what he knew? The limitless fields of speculation opened up made his brain reel.

Return to Mars is far from the greatest thing I've ever read, and is frankly ridiculous in all ways but for those I had anticipated - based on things other than actually reading the work of this author; but for what it is, this is a decent book beyond expectation, and I'll be sure to pick up Kings of Space should I happen to see it, although possibly not anything of Biggles.