Norway – Oslo

Our first impressions of the city were not really ideal.  We stayed the first night at the MS Innvik, a B&B on a boat, where the reception was somewhat strange; the Innvik is also a theatre and when we arrived we seemed to interrupt the beginning of some kind of rehearsal and, while no-one was at all rude to us, we were made to feel as if guests were a complete afterthought here.  From the Innvik, which is moored on the waterfront, we attempted to find some a ferry the BF had heard about which offers a reasonably priced way of viewing the scenery of Oslo, only to spend about half an hour trekking through very unprepossessing industrial wastes and signally failing to find a ferry.  After this time, we gave in and headed up to the more populated area of the city, and spent a very enjoyable couple of hours in the excellent National Gallery.  I hadn’t known what to expect from this institution, but I was pleasantly surprised at the quality and range of material on display.  I made copious notes on a stray piece of paper about the gallery and now, of course, I’ve lost that paper, but I can recall that we were both impressed by the landscapes of J. C. Dahl, that I liked some paintings by Nikolai Astrup and Harriet Backer, that Munch struck me as very like Van Gogh in his use of colour and that Norwegian art brings up similar themes time and again: rendering the landscape in a sinister or dark way, metaphorically and physically; featuring death scenes, often of children; generally gloomy of outlook.  But in a good way.

On Saturday, day five in Norway, we had a far more successful wander around the city than on our first day.  Some photos:

The pretty harbour area, with massive medieval fortress (the Akershus) visible in background

The Norwegian parliament building

The royal palace

I’d heard about it before, of course, but it is remarkable how unusual it feels to be able to go up as close as you like to both the parliament building and the royal palace, with no fences or security hoardings visible.  The royal palace is surrounded by a park and nothing else.

Sunday, making use of our Oslo Passes, was a museum-filled day.  In the morning, hot-footing it as best we could after filling up on the immense and extremely good breakfast at our hotel (the Best Western West Hotel), we got a ferry to the Bygdøy peninsula, where there are a number of museums close together.  I was greatly impressed by the Viking Ship Museum, which houses three ships in a church-like building.  I was particularly struck with this building because these ships, while they were used as vessels in their time, were only discovered as archaeological artefacts because of their other use – as burial objects.  The building reflects this purpose extremely effectively, inspiring quiet contemplation (though the shouty museum guards go some way to dispel this atmosphere), with muted colours and simple shapes.  The BF particularly liked the fact that it does exactly what it sets out to do and no more – there are the three boats, the findings from these boats and nothing else, but such a collection is more than enough.

From the Viking Ship Museum it was a short walk to the Fram Museum, which displays the famous Fram, one of the boats used in Roald Amundsen’s journeys to the poles.  This was another very good museum (and I say this not having greatly relished the prospect of it).  The building of the museum houses the entire boat with very little room to spare, so I’m afraid we have no decent pictures from this visit, but visitors are able to go into the boat itself and have a wander round (the comedy photo opportunities at the wheel and on the deck, making explorer poses and crying “land ahoy” are quite simply legion) and the rest of the exhibition is very informative and thoughtfully curated.

We took the ferry back to the main city to visit the Ibsen Museum, which I had been greatly looking forward to all along.  This is situated in Ibsen’s final home, within view of the royal palace.  You’re only able to get into Ibsen’s own apartment as part of a guided tour; we waited for the next tour in the adjoining exhibition on his times and work, which I didn’t feel told me much I didn’t already know from having read some of his plays, though it was very attractively present.  The apartment itself, though, was extremely interesting, as was the tour.  I generally prefer to wander by myself, but our tour guide, in excellent English, gave us an insightful and entertaining talk through the apartment.  The museum has a convoluted history, with Ibsen’s belongings having been for a long time separated throughout Norway and elsewhere in Europe; it is only very recently that they have been brought together again in their original home.  If you’re in the city and you’re halfway interested in drama, literature or the period of the nineteenth century, I’d really recommend this tour.

The final thing I want to discuss about Oslo is the work of Gustav Vigeland, which was easily my favourite thing about the city.  Vigeland’s work is represented in a free park and a nearby museum in Oslo and, while we visited these on different days, I think they complement each other so well that I have to talk about them together.

Vigeland was originally commissioned to work on a fountain by the city council and, from what I can make out of its history, it simply grew and grew from there, until eventually he made a deal with the council that they would build him a home and studio near to the park which, in return, would become a museum to Vigeland’s work on his death.

If entering by the main gate on Kirkeveien, the first prospect you’re faced with is a large footbridge, which is decorated on either side by nearly life-size bronze figures of all shapes, sizes, ages and expressions.

Crossing the footbridge, you’re then faced with a massive fountain, again with figures all in bronze.

However, this hasn’t aged so well, so let’s go to the far clearer images from the Vigeland Museum of his original clay figures, from which the bronzes were then cast:

The central fountain represents the burden of life, while around it are dotted these wonderful Art Nouveau-ish tree groups.  Again, Vigeland attempts to represent everything within these groups and so we get the very young:

Via the prime of life:

To death itself:

There was also a group that we didn’t get a very good photo of, but that I was really taken with – a couple, representing an unhappy marriage, who were trapped by their tree, forced by the growth of the limbs to stay together.  The tree is a really elastic symbol for Vigeland, enabling to talk about entrapment as well as growth and youth and the eventual cycle of life.

From the central fountain, you come to what is, for my money, the main show in Vigeland Park – the monolith.

As the name suggests, the main central sculpture is made out of one single stone (this amazed me, before the museum I had been coming up with all these involved ways they might have used to hide the joins).  The central stone, which is made up of (to quote Robyn Hitchcock) “bodies climb[ing] each other to the sky”, is surrounded by smaller groups, again of all different ages and moods.

This one’s my favourite.

The monolith itself is probably better understood from the museum, where it is split into three and so is more easily seen (in the park, the top is hard to distinguish).

In the museum, it’s clear that the top of the monolith (in the photo, the top is the third nearest the camera) features little kids and babies; while there are kids and babies scattered throughout the rest of the monolith (and hence aren’t getting to the heights), I thought it was a lovely idea that people strive to push their children to the top, they always hope for more for their kids.  This said, though, it’s not a simple old-to-young progression bottom-to-top; the monolith is darker than that – people aren’t just helping each other out by lifting them up, but some are climbing over others in order to get to a higher position.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about Norway.  Normal service will resume from the next post on.

Norway – the bits that aren’t Bergen and Oslo

Because this post will attempt to cover a number of different topics in one go, I’m going to resort to bold text to highlight the different sections.  I hope this is acceptable.

The Oslo to Bergen train, while long (nearly seven hours), wasn’t in the least tiring; about an hour outside Oslo and its suburbs, the scenery put on an absolutely wonderful show, full of dramatic mountains, pine-covered slopes, attractive farmsteads and, around the Finse station (the highest station in Norway at 1,222 m aabove sea level), snow.

Snow, there.  Unfortunately, much of the rest of the scenery, while equally arresting, was frequently much less photographable from a train seat, particularly with screens of pine trees in between the middle distance and the camera, as well as the understandably somewhat dusty carriage windows – here are the couple that I thought most salvageable:

Please take my word for it: this trip is absolutely wonderful and doesn’t feel anything like as long as the journey time would indicate and, while the photographic record mightn’t show it so well as I’d hoped, there is astonishing variety in the scenery too, going from temperate-and-brown to entirely snowed-under wastes of land to Alpine landscapes at the Bergen end.

On day four we took the Flåmsbana, or Flåm railway.  As you may remember from the itinerary, the plan was to take this railway down to the little town of Flåm from the station at Myrdal; from Flåm we’d journey through two fjords to Gudvangen and from Gudvangen take a bus onward to Voss, where we’d booked a hostel for the night.

This is not how it took place.

We did manage to take the Flåmsbana down to Flåm without incident, and the train is absolutely stunning.  In about 50 minutes it takes you from Myrdal, 865 m above sea level, to Flåm at sea level (the BF had to explain to me that this is quite a feat of engineering and so its fame is more than justified for that alone).  But that’s not why it’s such a tourist attraction: it is more famous because it is breath-taking.

By choosing to go from Flåm to Gudvangen to Voss (rather than the other way round, which is the conventional tourist route), we avoided the rest of the tourists, which meant that we could rocket from side to side in our carriage, empty but for two others, to get the best possible view of the magnificent sights out of the windows on each side.  Taking this route also meant that we had a few hours to spend in Flåm itself, rather than the 40 or so minutes that the usual route allows it; the BF, having read all the literature, found this inexplicable, as Flåm is apparently very beautiful.

It is indeed beautiful, but my God it’s boring.  The sum total of things to do there are the little museum about the Flåmsbana, about five minutes of marvelling at the scenery, and the dubious attractions of about three cafés, none of which opened until the rest of the tourists, coming in the opposite direction to us, turned up.  Three and more hours in Flåm does not exactly fly in; it is what I imagine purgatory is like.

When we went to take the ferry for our fjord trip, we were informed that an avalanche had put paid to the bus that was meant to take us from Gudvangen to Voss at the other end, and so we were treated to a trip up just one of the fjords (the Aurlandsfjord) and back again, in time to take the Flåm train back to Myrdal to wait on a train that would ultimately bring us to Voss by around nine (as opposed to six, as the unimpeded bus would have done).

Still, mustn’t grumble.

Now to the all-important gastronomic report.  Your intrepid taste-testers discovered a number of toothsome Norwegian delicacies which we would like to recommend to the world at large.

The BF’s top tip from Norway is the Kvikk Lunsj, which he was delighted to learn was basically a Kit-Kat not made by Nestlé (whose products he, the big Guardian reader, won’t touch).  It is, however, made by Kraft, so I’m not sure whether this is really a tremendous step up the morality ladder.  It even has nostalgia value, apparently, because it is so packaged that it will melt in its own wrapper.  For some reason this is to be cherished.

I think my favourite was the excellent Fruktnøtt bar made by Freia.  Be advised, though, that the plain old bar (the Melkesjokolade) is not a patch on their fruit and nut version.  I feel obliged to tell you the above photo features a monster 200g bar not because I’m a glutton, or at least not entirely, but also because it was to do the pair of us for at a day or two of immense train journeys.  Yes.

I think we both really liked the Smil sweets, again made by Freia, which the BF dubbed “ethical Rolos”.  They are nice, though are again made by a company owned by Kraft, so I’m not sure how much more ethical they are than the usual kind.  (Please note the scenic photo in front of the Norwegian royal palace, taken a few doors down from the Ibsen Museum.)

Now!  The next post is my last on Norway and, appropriately, will be all about the Norwegian capital.  I hope you’ll join me for it.

Norway – Bergen

Bergen was the first city we spent a decent amount of time in (though we spent our first afternoon in Norway pottering around and failing to find things we wanted in Oslo), so I’m kicking off my Norway coverage with my thoughts on it.

We stayed at the Skansen Pensjonat, located about five or ten minutes’ very pretty walk from the railway station (“pretty” will be the keyword for Bergen, I think).

We weren’t actually in the guesthouse itself, but in an adjoining building where we had a small self-catering apartment (bigger than the BF’s normal flat) to ourselves.  I really liked this flat – it was very comfortable, conveniently situated for the central part of town that we wanted to explore and was in the heart of some of the most picturesque parts of the city.

A street hard by the Pensjonat.

The view from the guesthouse.

On our first day, we wandered around the Bryggen area, a warren of wooden buildings on the waterfront.  The area dates back to the middle ages, but, what with wooden buildings being considerably flammable, the buildings we saw are only the most recent reconstructions of the originals (there have been a great many reconstructions over the years).  They’re still used, mostly for businesses from what we could see.

The houses of Bryggen across the water.

A Bryggen alleyway.

From here we strolled up to the Rosencrantztårnet only to find that it was closed for the duration of our trip.  This is something to be borne in mind for the traveller to Norway out of peak season – while we didn’t get any rain or even any cold weather (Bergen was actually very warm, no need for a coat at all), because of the time we went (April) we encountered some difficulties with the closure of many attractions, many of which would be open by mid-May.  Also this afternoon we picked up a Bergen Card each for the next day, which came in very useful.

The next morning we had a walk of about a minute to the Fløibanen, a funicular railway that brought us up to Fløyen, a point 320 metres above sea level to view the city below (the cost of which was covered by the Bergen Card).  This was great fun, though I don’t recommend when you come back down on the train (though weirdy beardy hikers are welcome to walk the 45 minutes down to the city again if they so wish) that you sit in the very front seat.  This is a SCARY experience, plummeting down with nothing stopping you from certain death except a weedy little steel rope.

Bergen from the funicular train.

Next up was a visit to the Hanseatic Museum (the only thing we visited this day not covered by the Bergen Card), which I felt was very reminiscent of Dennis Severs’ House in Shoreditch.  The museum recreates what it was like to live as a German trader in Bergen during the middle ages (Bryggen began as a German-only area in Bergen, a city of its own within the larger city); it’s full of dark wood and the light even in the bright morning when we visited was weak – the effect was lowering, though the size of the house meant it was not claustrophobic.  I felt this was very enjoyable museum, though non-Norwegian speakers do have to do quite a lot of filling in with their own imagination, as English captions aren’t comprehensive.

I wouldn’t greatly recommend the Bryggen Museum along the same stretch, which we only went to because it’s covered on the card.  If you’re pressed for time, the archaeological remains, while educational, don’t make for much of a spectacle.

At this point we headed back in the other direction of town to avail of free internet in the library, facing the Byparken (very nice lake and formal garden).  This library quite impressed me, and strikes me as one of the many examples of how the Norwegians put their very high taxation system to excellent use.  The internet at the library was completely free, as it is in Ireland, but there was no need for a lengthy consultation with the librarian to book at a future date, or to be a registered library user – you just queued up and took the next terminal available, the limit being a very reasonable half-hour.  Other good uses Norwegian taxes are put to are, from what I could see, a really good public transport system in what is only their second city (as well as their really good national train service, and the excellent tram system in Oslo).  Oh, and I’m pretty sure the taxes have something to do with the fact that everyone – EVERY SINGLE PERSON – we encountered in Norway was perfectly able to help us out in English, attesting to what must be an excellent educational system.  Our pitiful attempts to glean a little vocabulary were completely unnecessary, with absolutely any shop assistant able to come to our aid with at least some English, ranging up to the likes of the tourist information centre employees who sounded like native speakers.

Next up were two of the five galleries which faced on to the Byparken.  The first was the Bergen Kunstmuseum, which wasn’t overwhelming, but the second, the Rasmus Meyer Samlinger, was far more successful, being a more manageable collection housed in Rasmus Meyer’s own home.  Pieces were displayed alongside some of Meyer’s furniture, which was a nice touch, as well as a piano that belonged to Ole Bull.  Another nice touch I noticed in Norwegian museums and galleries was the use of lockers – you stick a 10 kroner coin into a slot when you deposit your things and then when you collect them, it’s returned to you again (much like a supermarket trolley).  There are plenty of other countries where, after paying for an entry ticket, if you want to leave a heavy bag down while you visit the exhibits you have to pay through the nose.

After the galleries, we wended our way up the Nordnes peninsula.

Bergen is very pretty.

At the top of the peninsula we visited the aquarium, where the penguins performed all sorts of capers that slow digital cameras are unable to capture.

After the aquarium, it was time for some food.  Because it was very close to our apartment, we went to Egon, despite the British BF finding their English-language menu mortally offensive:

And that is all I have to report on Bergen!  This was a very enjoyable part of the trip.  The town is extremely pretty, and so exploring it is a lot of fun, while it is also eminently walkable – at least in the central part with most of the tourist attractions (Edvard Grieg’s home is now a museum, and that is in the area, but not central enough that we could fit it in to our itinerary, unfortunately).  The rest of my Norway report will follow shortly …

Preview

Hello!  I am back from my Scandinavian adventures with tales to tell and quite a lot of photos to show.  I thought it might be helpful to kick off proceedings with an idea of our projected itinerary (which worked extremely well, thanks to the BF’s comprehensive research, except on one day, due to unforeseeable circumstances):

Day one: arrival in Oslo, stay overnight.
Day two: train to Bergen (approx. 470 km); stay there two nights.
Day three: day in Bergen.
Day four: train to Myrdal; change train to Flåm, getting there via the famous Flåmsbana; take ferry to Gudvangen via the Nærøyfjord, the narrowest fjord in the world; bus to Voss; stay overnight in Voss.
Day five: train from Voss to Oslo; stay in Oslo.
Day six: day in Oslo.
Day seven: fly back to London.

Now, I plan to write up three posts – one each on our time in Bergen and Oslo, and another on the trains, because we spent a lot of time on trains on this trip (the Oslo to Bergen leg on day two took about six and a half to seven hours).  Until then, I leave with a few photos of Norwegian scenery and culture …

I’m off on my hols

Sculptures in Vigeland Park, Oslo

I’m off today to London, and will be going from there to Norway in another couple of days (primarily because it’s cheaper to fly from London to Oslo than from Dublin to Oslo).  This means that this blog will be inactive for about ten days, though I dare say you’re used to that at this stage.  On my return, I plan to make a roaring return to posting regularly; posts will include what will no doubt be fascinating guides to Oslo, Bergen and other bits of Norway, as well as the rest of those book posts which fell by the wayside while I was finishing off the last of my college work in the past week or two.  Take it easy!

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EDIT: This will be my soundtrack:

Cheery-bye.

Better late than never

Since writing I’ve churned out another essay (I would have preferred some more time …) and have found out that my exams went well.  I apologise for the unforeseen break in service; I’d like to resume with some of the images that have caught my eye recently.  I seem to have had my fill of books just for the moment.

I really liked this recent house tour on Apartment Therapy (AT post: Anne, Alex and Augie’s Appealing Abode); I think I like it particularly for being reminiscent, but different, to Anna’s lovely house at Door Sixteen.

I have also been following the Small Cool competition on Apartment Therapy with great interest – I think the restrictions of a small space can throw up even more ingenious ideas to get round the lack of space.  I particularly liked the one featured above (see AT post: Maggi’s Sunlit Space): cool floating desk, grey walls and pops of colour.

And it all falls apart

I’m afraid there’s no book recommendation today, as it’s the night before an essay is due in and, let me be honest here, folks, it’s not in great shape.  So I instead I recommend you read this very interesting post on The Happiness Project while I try to remember this:

See you tomorrow.

The rise of English as an academic discipline

I’m breaking ranks a bit with this post in my run of posts about books (hey, it’s Saturday night after all) as it’s not a review; instead, I’ve decided to write about a topic I’ve learnt a bit about, piecemeal, over my two years at university, but one I think is absolutely fascinating when you look into it – how English got started as a serious discipline.  English hasn’t always been a university-level subject: it only came into being in the nineteenth century.  The most helpful book I’ve found on the topic is Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932, which includes a chapter on this topic called “A Civilising Mission”.  All the quotes which follow are taken from this chapter – as it’s out of print, and the cheapest copy on the Amazon Marketplace is £142.76 at time of writing, I think I’m within my bounds to make use of it, though if you’re able to get hold of a copy in a library, I greatly recommend it.

Baldick identifies three main groups who influenced the rise of English – those entering the service of the British Empire; working-class men; and women.  The decision by the Civil Service of the East India Company in 1855 to open up administrative posts to competitive examination greatly influenced the English discipline, by allotting the same amount of possible marks to “our own language and literature” (Civil Service report) as to mathematics (knowledge of the cultures and languages of the natives themselves could be learnt by the successful candidates before arrival).  The aim was two-pronged: first, to inculcate in candidates a knowledge of the cream of their own culture; secondly, to encourage a taste for reading as opposed to the other avenues of gratification to which their power might lead them.  The influence of this move was somewhat ambivalent, however: the exams were written before any organised teaching had been put in place, so that, in Baldick’s phrase, “English Studies were subordinated to examinations before anyone could really say that English Studies existed”.

F.D. Maurice

The use of English literature becomes much more suspect in the context of working men’s education in the nineteenth century.  It was believed to have a softening, humanising effect on the reader and, it was hoped, would provide an antidote to a purely money-driven life.  Now, I’m all for bringing literature to those who are interested in it, but there is an insidious tone in much of the writing surrounding the education of working men; the concern with educating the masses only came to prominence in opposition to proletarian politicisation, such as in the form of the Chartist movement.  F.D. Maurice (above), a founder of the Working Men’s College, was of the opinion that a grounding in literature would have a unifying effect on the nation as a whole, so that “class may be united to class, not by necessity only, but by generous duties and common sympathies”.  Lord Playfair was a bit more blunt:

The main purpose is not to educate the masses, but to permeate them with the desire for intellectual improvement, and to show them methods by which they can attain this desire.  Every man who acquires a taste for learning and is imbued with the desire to acquire more of it, becomes more valuable as a citizen, because he is more intelligent and perceptive. (Published 1894)

The study of literature, at least in theory, would make the working class more sympathetic to the decisions of the upper orders, while at the same time making them know their place socially.  And the thing is, this plan of action worked, at least in some quarters.  Thomas Cooper, a Chartist agitator, testifies in his memoirs to the “humanising” (deadening?) effects of this education on a working-class student:

All this practice seemed to destroy the desire of composing poetry of my own.  Milton’s verse seemed to overawe me, as I committed it to memory, and repeated it daily; and the perfection of his music, as well as the gigantic stature of his intellect, were fully perceived by my mind.  The wondrous knowledge of the heart unfolded by Shakespeare, made me shrink into insignificance; while the sweetness, the marvellous power of expression and grandeur of his poetry seemed to transport me, at times, out of the vulgar world of circumstances in which I lived bodily. (Published 1872)

The final group that was of importance in raising the profile of English was composed of women.  Women, excluded from scientific training and the professions, were almost entirely restricted to the “soft” subjects - English history and literature or modern languages – if they were to learn anything, but women’s education was extremely ineffectually handled at this time.  F.D. Maurice (yes, him again) foresaw the dangers of leaving female education in a completely undefined sphere and, in establishing the Queen’s College for Women in 1848, sought not to enfranchise women but to forestall a more profound change in their traditional role:

In America some are maintaining that they [women] should take degrees and practise as physicians.  I not only do not see my way to such a result; I not only should not wish that any college I was concerned in should be leading to it; but I should think there could be no better reason for founding a college than to remove the slightest craving for such a state of things, by giving a more healthful direction to the minds which might entertain it. … They need education, not only to show them what they can do, but what they cannot do and should not attempt. (Published 1855)

This was the value of English literature: it was something women could do without scaring the horses as it was comfortably close to the traditional accomplishments (music, a little art, modern languages, etc).  Indeed, some thought it would help a woman in her training to be a better wife: as Charles Kinglsey, Professor of English at Queen’s College, put it in his inaugural lecture:

[W]oman should be initiated into the thoughts and feeling of her countrymen in every age … that knowing the hearts of many, she may in after life be able to comfort the hearts of all. … Such a course of history would quicken women’s inborn personal interest in the actors of this life-drama, and be quickened by it in return, as indeed it ought: for it is thus that God intended woman to look instinctively at the world.  Would to God that she would teach us men to look at it thus likewise.  Would to God that she would in these days claim and fulfil to the uttermost her vocation as the priestess of charity!

It was a bumpy path to Oxford and Cambridge, partly because the primary interest groups for the admission of English as an academic subject were composed of exactly the people (the working class and women) that had always been so efficiently excluded from their green squares.  The wranglings over its approval are amusing, particularly the contributions of E.A. Freeman, who said literary criticism was all “chatter about Shelley”, but who had a real point when he said that “we do not want, we will not say frivolous subjects, but subjects which are merely light, elegant, interesting.  As subjects for examination, we must have subjects in which it is possible to examine.”  A school of English language and literature at Oxford was finally approved in 1893 (more than 60 years after the first lecture on English literature at King’s College, London), but, to quote Baldick, “with no clear agreement having been reached on its nature or purpose”.  The English School at Cambridge was only independently established in 1917.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

This was one of my very favourite books of this academic year, and if I can convince anyone to pick this up and give it a go, then my little book-reviewing marathon will have been worth it.  Again, it’s a late Victorian text; again, it’s short (this time weighing in at just 70 pages!  At that length, there’s no excuse not to read it); again, it’s utterly absorbing.  If you haven’t read it, you probably think you know the story, but don’t think you know it from the films or the pop culture version of the story: you have to read Stevenson’s version to get it.  It becomes a detective story in his rendering of it and a fantastically creepy one at that, told for the most part from the perspective of Jekyll’s solicitor friend Utterson, a quiet, self-effacing man, who is perturbed by a clause in Jekyll’s will that leaves everything to a young man he has never met and about whom he has some unidentified but troubling misgivings – Edward Hyde.  Of course the twist, which everyone knows now, was unknown to the first readers of the book, and it fascinating to see how Stevenson ratchets up the tension to the big reveal, as well as how he deals with the fallout from that revelation.

I particularly recommend the above Penguin edition (and the cover photo is supposed to be blurry, it’s not just my camera) with an excellent introduction by Robert Mighall, who goes through all the most important issues raised by the text (my particular favourites include the depiction of the city, reading the Jekyll-Hyde relationship in a homosexual light and a really interesting comparison to a text it’s very closely related to, The Picture of Dorian Gray).

The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds is a fin de siècle narrative of imperial anxiety, only this time (unlike The Beetle) the invading aliens are actual aliens – Martians, to be precise.  The book traces the Martians’ time on Earth, from landing to gaining ascendancy (very quickly) over the humans with whom they come into contact.  It is both brilliant fun to read and extremely disturbing, as Wells is, like Thomas More in Utopia, utterly straight-faced in his presentation of the story; where I think Wells is cleverest is in not just using ”newspaper cuttings” to back up the Martian story mindlessly - the unnamed narrator is a scientifically trained man who is on the ground when the Martians land, and so engages with the newspaper evidence, pointing out where they’ve got it wrong and what actually happened.  These complications add immeasurably to the believability of his account. 

Wells is also scrupulously logical about everything imaginative in the novel, and there is a very clear sense that they’re not to blame – the Martians are our endpoint too.  The Martians have simply evolved too far, so that they are now hardly more than walking brains with wasted limbs and as a result they have taken to wearing extremely sophisticated machines in order to make up for the deficiencies of these bodies.  When the humans realise the danger the aliens pose, they immediately scramble for their bicycles, carriages and, interestingly, their cars (interesting because cars make up for human deficiencies in speed and protect the soft, fragile human body in a manner not completely dissimilar to the Martian machine-armoury and the super-fragile Martian body).  Scary, too, is the total and swift breakdown in communication that the Martians bring about, to the extent that, initially, no-one outside the affected area is fully aware of the dangers of the Martians and then, later, no-one can know how widespread the Martian threat is – whether the whole world has been laid waste or just isolated pockets.  Very little, in fact, in this book is heartening, though it is cheering to see the efforts made by the likes of our narrator, who does his best to piece together all the available information in good late-Victorian fashion.  If you’re looking for a scare that’s decidedly nearer the bone than The Beetle or Dracula, this is the one for you.