John  Wyndham 


THE  MIDWICH  CUCKOOS

(1957, 2000)

 Penguin. 2000. Paperback.

ISBN-10: 014118146X

reviewed by Patrick Killough


(1) biblio.com 09/23/2011

Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. * * * * *

review:

On September 23 not long after the end of World War II, say 1947 or thereabouts, the narrator of THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS drove off with his wife from the village of Midwich  to London to celebrate his birthday. Luckily for him (Richard Gayford) and her (Janet Gayford), the couple were absent from Midwich when an alien vessel (whether coming from somewhere on earth or outside the solar system is never made clear) landed there. The UFO stayed long enough to erect a force field around all the buildings which rendered temporarily unconscious every man or beast within its range. Trying to reach home on foot, avoiding hastily set up police and military road blocks, Janet and Richard walk into the force field and fall to the ground.

Over the next few months the Gayfords and other villagers slowly learn that every fertile woman present in Midwich on the night of September 23-24 is with child. Married, unmarried, sexually active, virginal, it doesn't matter: all are preggers -- 60 or so of them!  Janet is not.

The village's rector and physician work together to piece together the facts and guess at an explanation. But keep your eye on Midwich's resident genius, thrice-wed Renaissance thinker, the much published ethicist Gordon Zellaby. In the end, years later, it is Zellaby, who has grown fond of the Children and who gives them sweets and shows them movies, who finally figures out what has happened, what the Children are capable of and what must be done.

Other players are mainly outsiders, a representative of military intelligence,transient staff of a hush-hush village-based research laboratory,  London Ministry educational types that begin a multi-year watch of the Children born. For those offspring are not human. They look human, but they grow faster, they learn like lightning and what one girl learns, all other girls also know instantly. The boys are they same. And not only do the Children learn together all at once. More importantly, they exhibit and focus their will power to influence the thoughts and behaviors of the humans arround them. When provoked, they react decisively, quickly and violently. Is a happy ending even conceivable?

Read this 1957 sci-fi novel and enjoy finding out for yourself. And/or view the two film versions: both entitled THE VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960, 1995, the latter set in California with Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley).

Author John Wyndham, at times maddeningly, takes his time over every detail and character of his narrative, including eventually expaining his title, THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS. Some 59 species of cuckoo birds are "brood parasites," laying always or often their eggs in the nest of other species of birds that will raise them to maturity. Brood parasitism aka exo-genesis is what happened in Midwich. An alien intelligent species impregnated human females. To what end?

Author Wyndham deliberately keeps things vague, very vague. But by the time they are eight years old, the human-looking aliens of Midwich look and act like 16-year olds and know that human forces are gathering to exterminate them if they can.  

-OOO-
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(2) lunch.com  09/24/2011

name of review:  "the majority of feminine tasks are deadly dull and leave the mind so empty"

rating: * * * *

review:
One late September night around 1947 every single woman within the village of Midwich, England who could become pregnant did become pregnant. It wasn't long before all the startled virgins were flocking to either good ole doc Willers or good ole vicar Reverend Hubert Leebody or both for an explanation. The 1957 sci fi novel's title THE MIDWICH CUCKOOs hints at what had happened: aliens had planted their embryos in the wombs of the good women of Midwich, like some of the 59 species of cuckoos that are full-time or occasional brood parasites.

Time marches on. The aliens are born. Most of the willy-nilly mothers of Midwich cherish the slender, attractively built strangers among them who look human except for their golden eyes. After a few years those mothers who have moved away from the village with their Children (note the author's capital C), are compelled by the united wills of the youngsters to come back home.

There the three score boys and girls easily pool their innately superior intellects to learn 100 times as fast as mortals and steadily increase the power of their united wills to inflict vengeance on any human who does them wrong. This is the beginning of inter-species warfare. British Army  Intelligence learns of other similar alien colonies planted all at roughly the same time among Eskimos, in the USSR and a couple of other places. No set of humans anywhere on the globe is happy hosting the Children who, by the time they are eight, look 16. Why are they here?

The boy Children learn from other boy Children, not from the girl Children. But both sexes can pool their will power to effect changes at a distance.

Curiously, in the novel there is also a huge gap between the human males and the human females. Many of the males, e.g. the vicar, the doctor, the thrice-married Renaissance man ethicist, Gordon Zellaby, the only man the Children trust: these males can seem obtuse and slow on the uptake. But the women, by contrast, are absolute lame brains. Their maternal instincts are completely predictable. They sacrifice themselves for the good of their alien brood.

There are many fascinating layers of meaning in John Wyndham's 1957 sci fi THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS (which has spawned at least three motion pictures). Whether authorial obfuscation is deliberate or simply can't be helped, the way Wyndham words things can be tortured at best. A sample:

Good ole Doc Willers, grappling with the fact of the curiously passive acceptance of most of the women on their unexplained pregnancies, explains the way things are to his fellow males:
"... if we remember that the majority of feminine tasks are deadly dull and leave the mind so empty that the most trifling seed that falls there can grow into a riotous tangle, we shall not be surprised by an outlook on life which has the disproportion and the illogical consequence of a nightmare, whose values are symbolic rather than literal, " (Ch. 14, " Midwich Centrocline").

Know your structural geology? Then you grasp the curious title for Chapter 14: like the younger rocks in a centrocline formation, all of the Children who have left the village with their host mothers compel their elders to bring them back to be close to the other alien youngsters. The Children are, that is, centripetal. The aliens are like a hive of bees. Of course, that is not all they are. Read THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS and shudder to imagine how things may turn out.

-OOO-

http://www.lunch.com/ubergizmo/reviews/d/UserReview-John_Wyndham_
THE_MIDWICH_CUCKOOS-64-1765489-213687-_the_majority_of_feminine
_tasks_are_deadly_dull.html

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(3) bn.com   09/25/2011

title of review:  "We (humans), like the other lords of creation before us, will one day be replaced"

rating: * * * *

review:

It happened one late September night around 1947 in Midwich, an English village of no significance. Every inhabitant of the town went unconscious for hours. Something that might have been a space ship was photographed resting on the ground by a distant aircraft. People trying to enter Midwich ran through a force field that knocked them out without permanent damage. And every woman capable of it woke up pregnant.

For the next eight or nine years, the three score women who had given birth to human-look-alike aliens became stoically resigned to rearing them without receiving their love in return. Women who took their infants (called "the Children" with a capital C by author John Wyndham) away from Midwich were each compelled by their Child's will power to return to the village.

Very smart local men (the women are not portrayed as intelligent enough to contribute much) try to make sense of what has happened. Local males include the doctor, the vicar, the professional writer who narrates the 1957 sci-fi novel THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS and especially the absent-minded, bloviating resident Renaissance man genius and hero Gordon Zellaby.

Fleshing out local masculine insights are an army First Lieutenant who marries Zellaby's alien-impregnated daughter, a British military Intelligence official, scientific researchers and a handful of others.

By the time they are eight, the Children look 16, learn a 100 times faster than humans and can collectively radiate intimidating, indeed fatal will power when they feel threatened. The plot is so slight that it could be told in a short story: like cuckoos laying their eggs in other birds' nests to be fed and raised to adulthood, aliens have implanted their young in human wombs.

But THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS is a slow-as-molasses, didactic, speculative, even philosophical novel for which plot is mere framework. For the baffled villagers and the secretive UK Government there are a few concrete options:
(1) should we kill the alien Children;

(2) should we keep them alive, study them and learn how to improve our own DNA;

(3) should we accept that they are not here to do good things for us; and

(4) should we prepared to let them rule over us?

 At a higher level of abstraction, deep thinker Gordon Zellaby guides the other human males in Socratic dialogs about "the big picture" of what is going on.

Is a cosmic evolutionary process at work? If the survivors of this alien-human interaction will be "the fittest," it is not going to be the humans. Oh, well, every top dog has its day. Once the dinosaurs ruled the land. Someday after nuclear annihilation it may be the cockroaches. What will be, will be. Earth was probably picked to be colonized because the aliens know that we humans are too chicken, too moral to wipe out the greatest threat ever to our very existence.

In a small circle of friends toward novel's end, third wife Anthea being present, polymath Gordon Zellaby says that weak-minded women simply assume that humanity will exist forever. Males are more thoughtful:

"We do occasionally contemplate the once lordly dinosaurs and wonder when and how our little day will reach its end. ... But ... one must take it that we (humans), like the other lords of creation before us, will one day be replaced. ... Well, here we are now, face to face with a superior will and mind. And what are we able to bring against it?" (Ch. 19)

Read THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS and find out.

-OOO-

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/midwich-cuckoos-
john-wyndham/1100195484?ean=9780899683874&itm=
1&usri=the%2bmidwich%2bcuckoos

http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/
review.aspx?reviewid=1876489
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(4) amazon.com   09/26/2011

title of review:  I piggyback on other reviewers for "asymmetrical warfare" and "anglicisms"

rating: * * * *

review:

As of September 26, 2011 (today), there were 24 reviews of THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS on amazon.com. I have read them all and four or five were first class. Let me pivot from slants offered by two of them and then add a thought or two of my own.

Two ideas from earlier reviews stay with me: "asymmetrical warfare" and "anglicisms."

ASYMMETRICAL  WARFARE

The cuckoos of THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS are aliens implanted in the wombs of three score women of an insignficant English village. A decade later "the Children" (with capital letters) are all in the village practicing their uncanny skills of massing and projecting group wills. Anything but subtle or diplomatic, they use violence against anyone who attacks them.

Let us not forget the vast power that presumedly adult aliens exhibited at Midwich on a September night sometime around 1947. They landed a space ship. They left without possibility of pursuit. They sowed their seed effectively in every fertile woman in Midwich. And they did the same thing in at least three other widely scattered human communities on earth. They seem to know that the more "civilized" earthpeople will be loath to exterminate the Children, even if they fear that when Children become adults they will do evil things to humans.

Asymmetry? Yes. Not only inter-species asymmetry, but human males and females behave asymmetrically in the face of cosmic annihiliation. Females accept the Children and only the males have sufficient detachment and brain size to assess the alien threat -- albeit at the speed of molasses in January. Boys and girls among the children learn separately as sexes. But there is otherwise no asymmetry in their behavior.  Human adult males select among the cosmos- shaking choices open to them in regard to the aliens: negotiate, exterminate, otherwise neutralize, learn from them, welcome or at least be resigned to a future in which the aliens will reign, etc. Indeed human males have all the power worth having in Midwich, including power over women. There is no female vicar, doctor or other person in authority.
ANGLICISMS

I take the reviewer's point, though it is not so much the anglicisms that gave me trouble. It is the same thing I experienced in reading Kipling's PUCK OF POOK'S HILL. That is, England is a land rich in folk lore, legends and literature and even the little people of a village seem steeped in all of them -- far more so than most Americans. Britons know their history. And their local landscape is magical.
OTHER REFLECTIONS

Let's face it: THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS is a didactic novel. Its plot could be expressed in a short story. The action is dragged out over a decade. Most of the characters, except perhaps for Renaissance-man bloviator Gordon Zellaby, are a couple of dimensions shy of three in depth. The gifted author John Wyndham does not merely hide his considerable art. (Think of the apt but convoluted title for Chapter 14: "Midwich Centrocline.") Wyndham of set purpose uglifies his art, ties English in intentional syntactical knots, shows the human males at work on the aliens problem moving at a snail's pace, dithering, being obtuse. Is this the other side of a grotesque coin created by Franz Kafka?

-OOO-

http://www.amazon.com/Midwich-Cuckoos-John-Wyndham/
dp/014118146X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=
1316428558&sr=1-1
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(5) epinions.com 09/27/2011

Review Title:  Who will replace humans as lords of creation?

Product Rating:    * * * *

Pros: A famous didactic novel of inter-species asymmetrical warfare in one English village

Cons: Slow. Might have made a better fast-paced short story. Speculative. Talky. Contrived English.

The Bottom Line: See the three derivative movies. Ponder the likely End Days of the human race. What will the new lord of creation look like? Unkink some deliberately convoluted sentences.

aohcapablanca's Full Review: John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos


There is broad consensus among experts that John Wyndham is a superior writer. And few there are who do not know his THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, THE KRAKEN WAKES or THE OUTWARD URGE. A British science-fiction writer, Wyndham was a contemporary of the American writer Ray Bradbury. Wyndham's 1957 novel THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS is widely labeled a "classic." The novel has even begotten films: two each called VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (one set in England, one in California) and a British sequel of sorts, CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED. The book is readily available in print, as spoken on CDs or via wireless readers. THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS is not about to go away any time soon.

I find THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS hard to describe. 

   -- (1) Its plot might work better as a fast-moving short story, with its ending or endings left open. Briefly put, one late September night in 1947 an alien ship lands in the utterly unspecial village of Midwich, England. Its never seen alien adults erect a force field around the perimeter. Within the field all animals and humans fall unconscious. Six hours later the space ship and its crew are gone. The animals and humans regain consciousness. And all women in the village, 60 or so, capable of being impregnated, are pregnant. 

The aliens are born healthy, ostensibly human, but look strangely alike. They learn about 100 times faster than humans. Their intelligence and their wills are collective, essentially one, leaving the Children (always described in Capitals) no more individual than are  worker bees. When they are nine years old, they look 16. If someone injures them, by accident or on purpose, the Children pool their wills and take instant, increasingly violent revenge. Can this new alien species of non-avian cuckoos or brood parasites co-exist with humans? End of short story.

   -- (2) But in THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS plot is a mere framework for a larger agenda. Hence short story morphs into novel, a very slow-moving didactic novel. What are the didactic and stylistic elements that make the novel a rather queer but winning amalgam?

    -- (a) The Children and the humans are at war. The Children, though few in numbers, have mental and volitional and even telepathic powers far beyond what adult Britons can marshall against them. The children have no empathy for humans in pain. And lurking behind the visible children are the invisible, Lord-knows-where-they-have-flitted, adult aliens. Negotiations seem doomed. The Children do not offer terms. Humans appear too kindly to assassinate the Children. So it is inter-species war, very, very asymmetrical warfare.

-- (b) As between boy and girl Children, there is only one signficant difference -- in the way they learn. If one girl reads a story, all the girls instantly absorb the same story. The boys don't. But what one boy learns, all boys learn. This difference between alien sexes seems to have no practical effects in the novel. 

But among humans, there is a huge very important difference between males and females -- all but one of whom are flatter than three-dimensional. Even the brightest male adult seems very slow to make out what the aliens are up to in Midwich. But every male is a positive Einstein when compared with every human female.

Women are creatures of pure instinct and emotion. They accept the Children that they host and become their virtual puppets. Human women are already clearly subordinate to human males. If anyone is going to grasp what those deadly little rascal Children are up to and deal with them, it is, of course, the males. The two community leaders are both male: the Doctor and the Vicar. The only three-dimensional character is thrice-married Gordon Zellaby. His daughter by wife number two carries an alien Child to term and raises it for nine years. Zellaby is a much published egghead, ethicist, historian and ueber-bloviating philosopher. In the end he solves the alien problem of his village.

--(c) Much of the speculation and preachiness of THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS occurs under the Socratic direction of Gordon Zellaby. Better than Doctor, Vicar, Military Intelligence Officer, the Head of a locally based hush-hush laboratory, better than the novel's fiction-writing narrator and better than people sent by the Ministry of Education in London, Gordon Zellaby is the man of the hour. It took him ten years but he decided what needed doing. Meanwhile he led his interlocutors and disciples through webs of speculation about cosmic purposes, the inevitable End Days of the human race as determined by survival of the fittest (it happened to dinosaurs, it will happen to us -- just not yet, please, Lord, not just yet, not via these dreadful Children). In one such dialog good ole Doc Willers pontificates and explains why women are no help at all in solving the alien  problem:

"... if we remember that the majority of feminine tasks are deadly dull and leave the mind so empty that the most trifling seed that falls there can grow into a riotous tangle, we shall not be surprised by an outlook on life which has the disproportion and the illogical consequence of a nightmare, whose values are symbolic rather than literal, " 
(Ch. 14, Midwich Centrocline"). 

Zellaby gains the Children's trust by feeding them sweets, showing them movies, and treating them as virtual adults and intellectual partners in a joint adventure of growing up wary aliens among increasingly terrified humans.

-- (d) Finally, it is hard to ignore Wyndham as stylist and contortionist of language. He is a gifted author and must know what he is doing But his language is often as contorted as his plot is plodding. Look again at the passage quoted above about why women's intellectual horizons are cramped. Look also at the Chapter Title: "Midwich Centrocline." 

Yesterday while leading a tai chi practice, I asked a woman if she knew what a centrocline is. In geology it is a fold where young rocks seek the center and older rocks are on the outer periphery. This highly educated woman had tramped the world with her PhD geologist husband. She had helped him with the manuscripts of his four books. She had never heard of a centrocline.

Yet the phrase is at some level well selected for a chapter title. The alien Children compel by force of will their host mothers who have left Midwich to return to the village to live with their fellow Children. They form, that is a centrocline, get it? Of course, the more obvious "centripetal" would have worked, too. But centrocline? Why did John Wyndham speak that way? In what sense are children rocks? In what sense is species conflict geology?

Wyndham's English is for a fact often tortured. But that is part of what fascinates readers down the decades about THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS. Why does Wyndham write this way? What hidden riches does his strange way of putting things open up to the canny reader?

-OOO-

p.s. Thank you DramaStef for making this novel reviewable.

Recommended: Yes

http://www.epinions.com/review/John_Wyndham_The
_Midwich_Cuckoos_epi/content_565222149764
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http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/wyndham_cuckoos.html