The Pool of Fire

John Christopher The Pool of Fire (1968)
Here's the third in Christopher's Tripod trilogy, a book which happily maintains the high standard of the first two; although it's thematically so similar, or at least consistent, as to suggest that we may as well view Tripods as a single book split into three. Once again our heroes pit themselves against their mysterious alien overlords in a struggle which emphasises travel and invention. There's a certain specific flavour to Christopher's novels - or at least to the four I've read - and only now have I noticed that he seemed quite keen on the same values and qualities as Baden-Powell, father of the scouting movement. He spends a lot of time describing journeys made across unfamiliar countryside, with his characters getting by on the strength of their own wits, common sense, and basic ingenuity - lots of wittling and navigating by the stars. I've also noticed Christopher's emphasis on the nobility of the imaginatively named Fritz, a German boy featuring in what is a children's book published at a time when every playground in England was still busily restaging the second world war; and I strongly suspect that the Tripods books were very specifically written as a reaction to both the second world war, and modernity in a more general sense:

On the rare occasions when I turned my mind to look beyond our primary objective, and thought of the world that could be when it was liberated from our oppressors, my vision was hazy and mostly, I am afraid, centered on pleasures. I envisaged a life of hunting, riding, fishing—all the things which I enjoyed made a hundred times more enjoyable by the knowledge that no Tripod would ever again stride across the skyline, that we were the masters of our own habitation and destiny, and that any cities that were built would be cities for men to dwell in.

But for the presence of the invaders, the Earth of the Tripods has been restored to a rural, pre-technological idyll, and we learn that the original invasion - as apparently described in When the Tripods Came, which I haven't read - was facilitated by the advent of television, through which the aliens were able to hypnotise humanity. The Pool of Fire ends with the invaders in defeat and the human race attempting to overcome those cultural and political differences which have always divided it, yet with the restoration of a technological society striking a curiously ominous note.

Under other circumstances, this story could have gone horribly wrong as one of those exercises in nostalgia so typical of certain Doctor Who fans, for some reason, in which the rosily-hued past is somehow tantamount to a time before all those blackies come over and spoiled everyfink; but Christopher gets the balance exactly right, presenting his argument without any reactionary element, meaning that the important stuff about cooperation and the value of not being a twat still very much applies.

This is a wonderful conclusion to a wonderful trilogy. I don't know what the quality of children's fiction is like these days, but I really hope it's this good in its own way.

The Death of Grass

John Christopher The Death of Grass (1956)
A classic, I was reliably informed, and so - having already been impressed by two of Christopher's Tripods novels - I kept an eye open, eventually finding a US edition retitled No Blade of Grass with a cover promising the heaving of bosoms and stuff; and it is a classic, and a classic very much in the mold of a John Wyndham novel wherein stiff upper lipped types try to get by in a world ruined by agency of a massive global disaster. The difference, as Brian Aldiss clearly took great pleasure in pointing out, is that the upper lips of Christopher's protagonists soon lose their stiffness. In Trillion Year Spree, his history of science-fiction literature, Aldiss berates Wyndham for writing cosy catastrophes wherein the central characters have a jolly old romp despite the alien invasion, end of civilisation, or whatever, additionally praising Christopher for putting his own cast of survivors through a genuinely harrowing meat grinder of a tale.

Anyway, what we have is the destruction of the ecosystem through a virus which kills grass in all of its forms, notably including wheat, corn, and rice. So humanity is fucked, no more bread, and not much upon which livestock can graze, and civilisation collapses, and it looks as though the government have dropped atomic bombs on the larger cities in hope of reducing the population to numbers which might stand a better chance of long term survival. We follow Christopher's protagonists across country as they make for the sanctuary of an isolated valley one of them recalls from childhood. They have guns, they pick up strays, they encounter other roving bands of scavengers, and then it all turns unexpectedly bleak as they meet Jane's family, kill them in self defence, then debate whether it would be kinder to kill the aforementioned Jane than leave her to be raped by the next bunch to stumble upon the house. So it's a long way from being anything you could describe as cosy.

That being said, I think the cosy catastrophe label is a little unfair, and while it might apply to some of Wyndham's writing, I really don't see it with Triffids or Kraken; and on the other hand, whilst the people of The Death of Grass find themselves thrust into a world in which conventional morality will get you killed, we're nevertheless dealing with persons who would romp under other circumstances, and whose post-apocalyptic survival strategies serve as contrast to a lost golden age of traditional middle class values. Chaps are in charge and hoping things don't get too beastly, whilst women are to be protected because they can cook and bear children. The novel takes a dim view of humanity bordering on misanthropic whilst being slightly hamstrung by its harking back to moral values which arguably weren't that amazing in the first place.

Of course, it's still a great novel, and significantly one which was rewritten by Cormac McCarthy as The Road - a genuinely harrowing trawl through a similar apocalypse with a better grounding in basic humanity, less of the retired colonel, and which otherwise makes The Death of Grass look like some bloody awful Terry Nation effort.

The City of Gold and Lead

John Christopher The City of Gold and Lead (1967)
As you will almost certainly be aware, The City of Gold and Lead is the second of John Christopher's trilogy of children's books set upon an Earth dominated by the alien Tripods. Where The White Mountains seemed more obviously like something extrapolated from The War of the Worlds, this one represents the point at which the tale heads off into new territory. The White Mountains kept its Tripods as a mysterious but remote menace whilst focussing on more familiar human concerns with authority, and how we act when it spins out of control.

This time we go right into the Tripod city to live amongst them as they exist beyond the safety and anonymity of their walking machines. It could have gone horribly wrong in reducing something distant and fairly scary to a known, even potentially comic entity as the creatures from within the machines are revealed to be three legged, tentacled cones of alien flesh with hopes and desires of their own, and apparently based on George Melly - if the one who enslaves Will, our main protagonist, is any indication. Christopher nevertheless pulls it off with ease, crafting a horror story which comes close to hinting at the excesses of the Nazis despite that these Nazis appear to resemble the sort of rubber monsters we bought for five pence a throw and stuck on our pencil tops when I were a lad. It may even be the peculiarity of the Masters - essentially more personable variations on Lovecraft's Great Race - which maintains the fine balance of the narrative by keeping the Tripods at a slight remove from their operators, therefore preserving the menace established in the first book.

Beyond the obvious matters of facing up to tyranny, helping your pals, and generally selfless acts, The City of Gold and Lead doesn't seem quite so philosophically weighty as The White Mountains, although there's also the possibility that I may simply have been overthinking that one; but then it doesn't need to be, because it does what it does to the point of perfection, and is as such one of the best things I've read in a while. As with its predecessor, I really, really wish I'd read this back when I was of the age group for whom it was written.

The White Mountains

John Christopher The White Mountains (1967)
Annoyingly it turns out that I almost read this one when I was a kid, back when I belonged to the age group for which it was specifically written. I almost read it in so much as that I borrowed it from Kenilworth public library. My granddad used to take me there presumably in the hope of my developing a taste for books; and I did develop a taste for books, but not necessarily for reading them if they had no pictures inside and weren't related to something on telly, as this one didn't and wasn't, leaving just the starkly vivid cover of the Hamish Hamilton hardback to imprint itself on my slightly guilty consciousness.

As I read The White Mountains it took me a while to recognise it as the thing I once almost read, which I recalled only as a cover and a vague hint of heavily recycled H.G. Wells. I understood there had been a television series made of it at some stage, but that was after I left home so I never saw the thing.

Anyway, this book is fucking great, and I really wish I'd made the effort to read it back then. The inspiration drawn from H.G. Wells  is massive and obvious in so much as that the Tripods are his war machines lifted wholesale from War of the Worlds - inscrutable three legged mechanical alien tosspots differentiated only by their tendency to enslave rather than to exterminate - and yet the setting they inhabit is so distinctly its own thing that you don't really notice. This could be the sequel to Wells' story about three hundred years down the line had a few of the Tripods developed some sort of space Lemsip, but it doesn't really matter that it isn't.

The White Mountains describes future humanity reduced to a semi-feudal, effectively mediaeval existence as told through the eyes of its protagonist, a young boy soon to be Capped. Capping is what happens in this world when you reach the age of fourteen, it being some sort of implant performed by the Tripods designed to keep you compliant and docile as you reach maturity. Naturally our boy is suspicious and decides to run away from home, to seek the White Mountains where, so he's been told, humanity lives free beyond the reach of the invaders; and the White Mountains turn out to be somewhere in France, thus entailing all sorts of moderately harrowing adventures as our boy crosses land and even sea to get there.

The message is simple and is delivered without either sermonising or, conversely, any doubt of there being a message, namely concerning a healthy distrust of authority and the value of asking questions. This applies to the Tripods, but more so to the ruling human classes, those sanctioned by the aliens. Whilst the Tripods are terrible, they remain remote and mysterious, more in the line of an explanation for the shape of this blindly obedient society than as your traditional massed forces of alien evil. One of the most challenging choices to be made comes when our guy realises how much easier it would be to settle comfortably amongst the French aristocracy with whom he takes shelter.

I had travelled a long road since leaving the village, not only in hard reality but in my attitude towards people. More and more I had come to see the Capped as lacking what seemed to me the essence of humanity, the vital spark of defiance against the rulers of the world. And I had despised them for it—despised even, for all their kindness and goodness to me, the Comte and Comtesse.

But not Eloise. I had thought her free, like myself. I might even have come to the idea—its beginnings, I think, were in my mind already—that when we set off once more for the White Mountains, there might not be three of us, but four. All this was rendered futile by the sight of her bare head. I had come to think of her as my friend: perhaps more. But now I knew that she belonged, irretrievably, body and soul, to the enemy.

It's a children's book as children's books should be - in my opinion - defined by a focus on the sort of characters with whom younger readers will most likely identify without any sacrifice in quality, without talking down to anyone, and with some sort of actual content, something important which is communicated beyond just having a load of trainee wizards flying around for the sake of it.

I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed this as much when I was eight as I have done at fifty, and had I done so it might have got me into the habit of reading something other than Terrance fucking Dicks, but never mind.

The one I almost read.