Subject: _The Midwich Cuckoos_, John Wyndham

From: [email-masked] ("Rebecca Leann Smit Crowley")
Date: 17 Jan 1994 23:56:09 GMT

In between rereading a large stack of Bujold novels and after
ditching Gunnarson's _Dragons on the Town_ about twenty pages into it,
I picked up _The Midwich Cuckoos_.  This proved to be a very good 
idea.

Dani's already done a better job than I could of succintly reviewing
this book, and, at any rate, I'm more interested in writing about
the Zellaby character and his ethics/morals anyway.

Spoilers follow:


All vertebrate life in a hemisphere centered on a sleepy village in 
England -- Midwich_ -- is rendered unconscious for a little more
than a day.  Birds fly in and crash.  People walk in a topple. 
Vehicles grind to a halt.  No serious tragedy occurs, altho
a plane is lost when MI tries to get photos of the mysterious
object which has appeared near the ruined abbey.

When the people wake up, the object is gone.  A few months later,
it is discovered that every woman able to bear children. . .is.
The town rallies, MI helps keep it out of the news, and nine months
after the initial Dayout, 60 odd babies are born, apparently
human, but with golden eyes and a few less obvious differences
from run-of-the-mill humanity.

The women who moved away from Midwich find their few month old
babies compel them to return; several successfully abandon their
children to the village.  The children grow at approximately
twice normal rate; it becomes clear, over time, that the
60 odd children are telepathic within sex (all the girls
are mutually telepathic; likewise with the boys).

The town sage (_not_ the viewpoint character, which I think was
a neat trick, and very effective for a variety of reasons), an
author, is Zellaby.  He is married (3rd wife) and his daughter
(via the 2nd wife) is twenty something.  Both become pregnant.
His wife bears a normal human child (she was pregnant already,
presumably); his daughter, one of the Children.  The Zellabys
raise both.

The connection between the Dayout and the pregnancies is obvious;
all seem well aware that the children are not human, but for
a variety of reasons (it seemed like a good idea at the time,
and we're civilized, dammit, they're *our* children), the
Children are raised more or less normally.  The men feel cuckolded
(altho they were not); the women are coerced; the Vicar and
his wife wonder what it all means.  The viewpoint character
is watching to see what happens; his wife is substantially
less charitable towards the Children.  But Zellaby is fascinating.
While he recognizes that these Children are not human at all right 
from the beginning, while he realizes their ability to coerce
humans will eventually result in a racial death struggle between
Us and Them, and tho he notices their childish cruelty to
those who even accidentally harm them* , he maintains a level of
compassion and will to understand and even love them which is,
well, saintly.

Therein lies the power, for me, of this novel.  Zellaby is a really
good guy, he's _not_ stupid, he knows _exactly_ what the score is.
But he doesn't hate, he doesn't blindly destroy, nothing.  He listens,
he learns, he thinks.  He loves, he befriends -- to the limit
the Children will permit.  He gains their trust.  I spent a good
chunk of the book getting more and more depressed, because I
thought Zellaby was right; on the other hand, I had a horrible
feeling the Children would win because of his actions which, at 
least in context, would be Wrong.

So when our dippy, myopic protagonist trots over to the school
with Zellaby to help him carry his film cartons for the movie
that all the Children had gathered to see because they liked
Zellaby, who had taken the trouble to teach them compassion,
and a sense of humor, well, let's just say I chortled with relief.

This is an even better example of the kill-the-one-you-love motif
than DKM's _The Last Dancer_ (which was confused by the fact that
there was reason to believe the "victim" wanted to die).

Anyway, it's a very good book, not long at all, and it has
aged remarkably well.

*(Their justification for this is interesting, and very reminiscent
of some stuff in Card's _Ender's Game_.  The idea is that if
someone hurts you, intentionally or otherwise, and you have a choice
between stopping them, and stopping them plus hurting them
real bad -- counterattacking -- then counterattacking is
justified, to teach them a lesson.  So they'll try *real hard*
not to ever let it happen again.  Makes an impression, etc.
Card's use of it was a lot different, however.  Ender is being
hassled by a group, and it was clearly intentional.  Nor was
he able to see a way to just stop his attackters; any defense
he made required counterattack.  To save the time and pain of beating
up a lot of people, he beat one up, really bad (dead).  The Children,
however, had the ability to just _stop_ people.  They didn't.
Was the counterattack justified?  After all, several other places
Children were born, they were destroyed outright; Midwich is the
last group, and they are panicking.  I don't think, in the end,
it mattered whether their attitude was justified; like all good
tragedies, this at least apparently necessary attitude, this
"virtue", was also their fatal flaw, in view of the fact that
it probably was a factor in motivating Zellaby's later actions.
Certainly it suggested that it would never be possible to
make a treaty with the Children; they were bent on the destruction
of the human race and so thoroughly believed that one species'
survival entailed the other's destruction that no accomodation
could ever be found.  Zellaby tried tho; I think if Zellaby
believed he could ever convince them they could exist side
by side, in peace and mutual prosperity, so to speak, he
probably would have let them live and taken the risk of the
slow tide of evolution.  But they wanted to hurry things up.)
--
Rebecca Crowley		standard disclaimers apply	[email-masked]
		Successful Accidents and Unlikely Certainty