Your Humble Blogger has mentioned our household habit of reading longish books to My Perfect Non-Reader at bedtime, a chapter or so a night, right? Well, a few weeks ago, my PN-R decided that she really wanted to read The War of the Worlds. I was somewhat skeptical, but she was persistent. I felt that not only would Mr. Wells’es’s language be difficult for her, but that the essential horror of the book would be distressing, so I decreed that it would be a Bedtime Book, because I am an idiot. Well, it certainly helped with the language, because as we read, we could stop and ask if she understood stuff, and explain bits if they were perplexing, as well as just giving context to the words by the way we read them. I hadn’t remembered, though, that Mr. Wells, despite giving some superficial attention to the questions of physics and biology, and in between action-movie bits where giant mechanical tripods lay waste to bucolic villages with heat rays, is really fundamentally interested in depicting the breakdown of the veneer of civilization under stress. The horrific scenes of mob madness, of individual bestial behavior, of greed, cowardice, stupidity and venality (the depiction of the man who drops the money sack in the throng and attempting to pick it up is knocked over, mangled, trampled and run over by a cart has been haunting me since rereading it) are what the book is really about, and it’s not the sort of thing she had yet come across in her reading.
I don’t know how much of it struck deep. That’s another place where the stilted and archaic language, coupled with the (one hopes) reassuring presence of a parent holding the book may have helped. And there were no War of the Worlds-related nightmares, so that’s all right.
I was musing, at the end of it, about how much this early specfic focuses on the mental disintegration of people under stress. 20,000 Leagues touches on it, and Gulliver’s Travels lingers over it, and I can’t remember now the other book my Best Reader mentioned in that context that also fit that category. Frankenstein, that was it, and it’s the best example of the lot. I know there’s lots of good and bad reasons why specfic novels, over a century or so, got the reputation of being uninterested in human character, and I know there are lots of examples that confirm the stereotype as well as lots that don’t. And I know that nobody actually reads Frankenstein, but know the movie, and even more haven’t done either but know the monster from rubber masks and Scooby-Doo cartoons, so there’s little point in ranting about the character development, or rather anti-development, regression, devolution, what-have-you. Still.
I’m curious whether this will be a book that My Perfect Non-Reader reads over and over, internalizing it through repitition and making it safe through familiarization, or if it will be one of the ones that is put on the shelf and never touched again. I have to admit, I’m kind of hoping the latter. For myself, I’m not ready to read it again, and hope I won’t for years and years and years. It’s a good book, in its way, but not very enjoyable, if you know what I mean.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Yeah, I remember being a little weirded out, reading Frankenstein by how articulate the monster was in the book. I should re-read it with an eye to watching for social veneers cracking, and all. I think that theme was actually prevalent in 19th century writing, generally; not just in specfic. I could go on about that, but I’m going to bed, instead. Maybe I’ll read Frankenstein there.
I should say that in Frankenstein, the descent into madness isn’t so much the cracking of the veneer of civilization as, um, the temptation of dangerous knowledge? But the focus is on the disintegration, not the tech, if I remember. And, yeah, the monster doesn’t just grunt, he converses, and quite reasonably, too, except for that killing-Victor thing.
Thanks,
-V.
FWIW, I did, in fact, read Frankenstein there. Sadly, not all of it. But yeah, that thin veneer of sanity was a big thing for them 19th century types.