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Trade paperback, 383 pages Acquired September 2017Published 2016 Read May 2018 |
by Peter J. Beck
I should begin with some personal disclosures. As long-time readers, colleagues, and friends will know, I am low-key obsessed with H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. I teach it whenever I can; I published on its 1898 American rip-offs in the journal English Literature in Transition; I have presented on Marvel's Killraven, a schlocky 1970s sequel; I will argue this summer at a conference that M. T. Anderson's Landscape with Invisible Hand is an adaptation of it; and I have read and watched far, far too many versions of it. One of my dream book projects is to cover its various versions and iterations. So you can imagine my sadness and disappointment when I realized Peter J. Beck had beat me to the punch with a book from Bloomsbury Academic.
All of this is to forewarn you that when I say I don't like this book, I might just be biased because 1) I wanted to write this book, but also 2) it's not how I would have written it. Beck is a historian, and the book strongly emphasizes the history of The War of the Worlds. There's a lot of thorough, interesting background on where the book was written and when, both in terms of society/culture and in terms of Wells's personal life. About the first half of the book is given over to this. The weak part of the first half is Beck's handle on the novel itself; his interpretation of the book (in a chapter called "The War of the Worlds: Storyline and Methodology") is pretty short and pretty formulaic, to the point you wonder why he bothered. A lot of this I knew already, but then I'm pretty deep in the (red) weeds on Wells, so many readers will probably get more out of this than me. It's a lucid account of the book's writing and publication, even if it doesn't say much about the novel qua novel.
The discussion of the novel's "multimedia afterlife" covers a lot of ground very quickly, and sometimes the focus is odd. Comics and graphic novels get a mere two pages! There is a chapter on the 1898 American version, which I was happy to see draws heavily on my ELT article. (It also draws heavily on a LiveJournal post I made in 2009 during my first year of graduate school; never thought I'd see that incorporated into my citation count!)
There's a very thorough chapter on the 1938 Orson Welles version, and a much more superficial one on other radio versions of the novel. The discussions of the two major film versions (George Pal's 1953 and Steven Spielberg's 2005) are also pretty quick. The problem in these, as in much of the book, is Beck's historian mindset. He's interested in how these things got made, and somewhat interested in reactions to them, but there's not much analyses of the actual adaptations. If I were writing this book, I'd be focusing on the way the stories took Wellsian ideas and imagery and reworked them in different times and places.
Beck is really interested in Woking, the London suburb where Wells wrote the novel, and where much of the novel takes place. This helps the early parts of the novel, but diminishes its later parts, because I feel like Beck is too quick to dismiss adaptations that move the story out of Victorian Woking. The Spielberg film, for example, feels criticized for the fact that Spielberg didn't want to make a period piece. I don't like this attitude (as I've written about before), because it neglects that Wells was not writing a period piece. Wells was writing a story about aliens disrupting our complacency in the here and now. An adaptation that maintains the Victorian setting isn't doing what Wells was doing, it's doing something completely different. Now, Beck doesn't have to share this approach, but I wish he was more sympathetic to the motives of adapters that relocate the setting.
Relatedly, I also wish he was less sympathetic to Jeff Wayne's mediocre disco musical version of the novel, an adaptation whose valorization I will never understand except for reasons of kitsch. But for some reason it gets more than twice as much space as the Spielberg film despite being substantially less interesting from a literary and adaptative perspective.
There are also some oddities of structure. There are a couple chapters that lay things out in really brief detail that get covered more comprehensively later on, in a way that feels redundant. The second-last chapter for some reason includes a catalogue of the places Wells lived while writing the novel, the information from which really ought to have been folded into the first half of the book.
All that said, I'm worried that I'm biased because I'm jealous. But on the other hand, I'm kind of glad it's not the book I would have written-- because that means when I finally try to write my book, there will still be a gap in the world that it can squeeze into.
