Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Midwich Cuckoos

This English 1957 SF novel begins with total incomprehension, moves forward into dawning awareness filled with creeping dread, then sullen acceptance changing to psychological horror and ends up with full-on fear and loathing leading to inevitable catastrophe. What’s not to like?

You probably know the set up but anyway – this teensy English village is struck one evening with a sleeping sickness. Everybody conks out for 24 hours. It’s sudden so there are a few accidents. When they all wake up nothing seems to be amiss but as weeks go by it turns out that every fertile woman in the village is now pregnant. What a pickle.

John Wyndham has got himself a really squeamish idea here, the very thing to make people in the 1950s squirm and flinch from – mass pregnancies and no fathers? Because it is apparent that even virgins are now pregnant! Ewww! He lets his uncomfortable idea take the story where it might go, pretty much, but because this is 1957 there is NO MENTION of abortion whatsoever in the whole book. If he had written it only ten years later he wouldn’t have been able to avoid that prickly subject – some of the 60 or so women, knowing they had been made pregnant by something other than a human man, would have surely wished to terminate whatever lifeform was growing in their body. But not in 1957, it wasn’t an option. Should I say it wasn’t an option mentionable in a polite novel.

The other thing John Wyndham avoided LIKE THE PLAGUE was any talk of young teenagers becoming pregnant. There were, it seems no girls under the age of 18 in this village.

The grotesque situation is managed and commented on by the three or four wise birds of Midwich, all of whom are male, all of whom talk in a strangulated hoity toity manner where nothing should be mentioned directly if there is a longwinded circumlocution available – here’s our narrator :

Hitherto the spirit of Midwich had been not ill-attuned with that of the burgeoning season all around. It would be too much to say that it now went out of tune, but there was a certain muting of its strings.

Oh yes and the lower classes speak (when they are allowed a line or two) in a hilarious Cockerny:

Cor! That there Miss Ogle ain’t ‘alf goin’ to cop ‘erself a basinful of ‘Er Majesty’s displeasure over this little lot!

Because having babies happens to women and not men, the learned men get to comment on women and they say profound stuff like

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 inconsequence of a nightmare, where values are symbolic rather than literal.

In spite of all this slagging off, I really enjoyed this novel. I liked the idea (alien invasion by stealth) and the strange tension created by all these difficult ideas – surrogacy, parents not loving their children, reality being too bizarre for people to grasp – in the end it was cosy and nasty at the same time, a great combination.