The Midwich Cuckoos

An English village falls asleep one day and stays asleep for 24 hours. When the inhabitants wake, it’s not too long before they realise that every woman of child-bearing age is now pregnant. (Even a lesbian couple, whose relationship is so subtly suggested you could read right over it if you weren’t paying close attention.)

It’s probably that subtlety that appeals to me most. When I first read the book, I was 15. I read it as a science fiction adventure/horror story. And it’s easy to take that way. It’s certainly the approach the makers of Village of the Damned took when they filmed it in 1960. Then the children that resulted from the pregnancies, with their eerie golden eyes and ability to compel the humans around them with no more than the power of thought were simply seen as the villains of the piece.

(I like the film. It has that wonderful British quality of stiff-upper-lip restraint, when men wore ties and the village bobby did his duty and nobody flew into hysterical tantrums of panic. And the actors the film-makers found to play the children were genuinely creepy in their calm, silent determination.)

But it’s still basically a horror story, with plucky citizens facing a threat from alien life forms. And the book does possess that element. But what I love about it, and what I love about John Wyndham in general, is that he marries great storytelling with an analytical, logical study of the fantastical situations he’s imagined.

So while the children in the book are never treated as less than increasingly disturbing, Wyndham goes to great pains to examine the situation not just from the villagers’ point of view, but from the children's' standpoint too. That of a life form that finds itself in an alien setting, and does all it can to survive. The children aren’t in the village to harm it; they’re there to live. As all life forms are compelled to do.

And seen in that light, it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination for readers to ask themselves what they would do were they to become the children. Wouldn’t they fight back, against what they quite logically perceive as a threat to their existence? And what would be the choice for the humans then?

Intelligent and unsettling.