Carmen's Reviews > The Midwich Cuckoos

The dawn of the 27th was an affair of slatternly rags soaking in a dishwater sky, with a gray light weakly filtering through. Nevertheless, in Oppley and in Stouch cocks crowed and other birds welcomed it melodiously. In Midwich, however, no birds sang.

In Oppley and Stouch, too, as in other places, hands were soon reaching out to silence alarm clocks, but in Midwich the clocks rattled on till they ran down.

In other villages sleepy-eyed men left their cottages and encountered their workmates with sleepy good mornings; in Midwich no one encountered anyone.

For Midwich lay entranced.

While the rest of the world began to fill the day with clamor, Midwich slept on. Its men and women, its horses, cows and sheep; its pigs, its poultry, its larks, moles and mice all lay still. There was a pocket of silence in Midwich, only broken by the whispering of the leaves, the chiming of the church clock, and the gurgle of the Opple as it slid over the weir beside the mill.

The Midwich Cuckoos, or The Village of the Damned was written in 1957 by Wyndham, the same man who wrote The Day of the Triffids.

In this book, the small, sleepy English town of Midwich falls asleep by force one night. When the people awaken, nothing seems amiss except for a huge depression in the ground where perhaps an alien craft once stood.

The people try to forget what happened until they find that every female of childbearing age in the village is pregnant. At first, consumed by shame and secrecy, this is not common knowledge, but the rates of women falling downstairs, taking very hot baths, and attempting suicide by overdose are increasing. Virgins have to tearfully confess to their loyal fiances that they are pregnant. A man comes home from 18 months overseas serving in the military and is confused to find his bewildered wife pregnant. Another man nearly beats his wife to death upon finding out she's pregnant, convinced she's cheated on him. Young teenagers who have never had sex go to the vicar in confusion and angst about their inexplicable pregnancies.

As soon as the doctor and the vicar catch on to what is happening, they team up to from a female-lead committee to calm and support the masses - assure them that they have done nothing wrong, and stop these young women from trying to commit suicides and dangerous illegal abortions.

Finally, 58 children are born in the village. Only 5 are human. The rest have yellow eyes and a fearsome psychic power that can compel people to do their bidding.

This mass rape of a town's females by aliens is a form of invasion, a weaponized rape, a way to trick another species into welcoming invaders (their own children!) with open arms instead of guns and weapons as the aliens are poised for domination of the planet. As the Children become older and older, more and more dangerous, more and more murderous, and stand to inherit the entire planet, can anything be done to stop them?
...

I really enjoyed this retro sci-fi book. It was very interesting. Of course, you have what is now seen as "old-fashioned" discourse on the differences between men and women, such as:

"Man's arrogance is boastful," he observed, "woman's is something in the fiber. We do occasionally contemplate the once lordly dinosaurs and wonder when and how our little day will reach its end. But not she. Her eternity is an article of faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on forever. She doesn't believe in the dinosaurs: she doesn't really believe the world ever existed until she was upon it. Men may build and destroy and play with all their toys; they are uncomfortable nuisances, ephemeral conveniences, mere scamperers-about, while women, in mystical umbilical connection with the great tree of life itself, KNOWS that she is indispensable. One wonders whether the female dinosaur in her day was blessed with the same comfortable certainty."

If you can ignore this hogwash, or at least smile and be amused, you will get through this book fine. I found it amusing.

We also have a change of pace in which the bleeding-heart liberals of the books - the ones who see the Children as having a right to live - are in the wrong; and the conservatives who want to bomb all of the Children out of existence are in the right. It is put forth that England's "decadent, democratic" society is the perfect breeding ground for alien spawn because they are too diplomatic and liberal to sanction the hard choices that need to be made - killing the Children quickly and effectively - in a way that, let's say, Soviet Russia wouldn't hesitate to do. (view spoiler)[In fact, the aliens do rape and impregnate the females in a Soviet village. The Soviet government bombs the village, killing all the Children and the innocent human villagers when the children are about 9 years of age. In fact, "civilization" (and I use the term loosely) is seen as a weakness here. Both the "Eskimo" village and the "African village" (this can mean anything, obviously Wyndham was not familiar with Africa) kill the Children immediately, the "Eskimos" by leaving the demon-spawn outside to die of exposure. In Mongolia, all the women are killed upon being found pregnant, therefore killing both the human host and the Child as well, in the most woman-hating place depicted in the book. The Soviets keep the Children alive til age 9 in a hope to harness their intelligence and power, but the Children are too powerful and unable to be dominated in any way, shape, or form. (hide spoiler)]

Are the Children made in the image of God? Debates are held in the book as to whether - if God is all powerful and controlling the whole universe - with all its suns and planets - if God has created these aliens in God's own image and it is simply time for humans (who always thought they were God's Chosen Ones) to step down as head honcho of the universe.

Tl;dr - I found this book's religious and philosophical and political debates fascinating. Even thought the whole basis of this book is mass rape, this issue isn't really addressed except for a few off-hand comments from the women about how used they feel and how they feel 'like animals' after having been raped this way, but it's barely a plot-point. Completely glossed over, I feel, because Wyndham was a man who (probably) was never raped and can't understand this aspect of life. He just ignores this issue altogether.

The writing is good - Wyndham is surprisingly funny and does a fair job of characterization - Gordon Zellaby is a particularly strongly written character, although he isn't our protagonist.

A fine bit of retro-sci-fi fun.

Take a look at these creepy covers:



and my personal favorite: