The Midwich Cuckoos

This is the third Wyndham novel I've read, after The Day Of The Triffids and The Kraken Wakes. By now it seems that, when it came to structuring a novel, Wyndham was a bit of a one trick pony - “the master of the middle-class catastrophe”, I read somewhere. He can come across a bit quaint at times, and I'm sure he'd enrage third wave feminists everywhere. The first-person narrative by a middle-class English everyman who finds himself in the middle of the mystery, the quaint English backdrops full of regulation English character types (employed in bulk by BBC TV murder mysteries, for instance, as well as Wyndham), the preponderance of dialogue over action, the slow burning first half of the novel... you start to feel you're reading the same book over and over. But this all merely obscures the thoughtfulness and intelligence of Wyndham's writing. He projects a truly frightening scenario onto a very mundane backdrop, and compels very ordinary people to deal with it. It is the very trick of his books. I spent much of The Midwich Cuckoos wondering about apparent gaping plot holes (why does nobody bother to ask WHERE the Children came from, WHO begat them?), before Wyndham ratchets it up in the closing chapters and you realise he'd been leaving clues all along. Zellaby, the real protagonist (other than the Children), starts off as an insufferable bore but develops neatly into the novel's thoughtful hero. Wyndham intelligently poses important questions about evolution, hierarchy and dominance. At a certain point you realise he's got under your skin. And that is why, despite its faults, for which I knock off one star, I thoroughly recommend this as the most fully realised and thought-provoking of these three Wyndham novels. I'm now off to find a copy of The Chrysalids.