Cupcake's latest subject for the online book discussion group was H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. I was surprised at the choice of this challenging late-19th Century science fiction novel, since some participants in the group are only nine years old; still, the membership includes students all the way up to high school level so it's the members' choice whether they read any month's selection. My tentative suggestion that she might want to consider skipping this month's book fell on rejecting ears.
Before she'd finished the first chapter, however, Cupcake got bogged down in Wells's archaic style of storytelling, and asked me to read the entire thing to her in one day so she'd be ready when the discussion group became active online.
I groaned and pleaded that we just continue with Emma and I'd tell her what happened in WOTW, but she claimed that she couldn't PARTICIPATE in the discussion INTELLIGENTLY without having read the BOOK but the book was too HARD to read on her own and I'm always telling her to ask for help aren't I so now she's asking for help and how can I not help her?
How can you tell your kid not to read a classic?
Turns out, War of the Worlds is way tiresome. The writing, I mean. The story itself is interesting:
Indestructible metal cylinders fall to earth, which turn out to be occupied by large, leggy Martians intent on incinerating everything in their path with no clear goal aside from world domination. Eventually, after frying nearly everyone in Britain (but seemingly no where else; jingoism, anyone?) the Martians keel over for unknown reasons which the author attributes to microbes, whose link to disease had been only relatively recently identified by Louis Pasteur.
H.G. Wells was one of the first writers of modern science fiction; his stories laid the foundation for modern science fiction books and film, even the Rocky Horror Picture Show. War of the Worlds is a groundbreaking piece of literature. Nevertheless, in spite of the book's importance as a foundation of the genre of science fiction, its tone is stilted and pompous. Wells employs a tired technique of telling, not showing: first I did this, then I did the other thing; I didn't know it at the time but later learned that...; he told me he'd seen the following...; I think this technique was tired even when he used it in 1898.
Finally I just couldn't make it through one more chapter describing the exodus from one insignificant English village to another and the narrator's condescending conversations with characters he clearly believes are inferior to him intellectually and socially.
I declared myself off duty, spoiled the ending, and loaded Independence Day, pointing out that the main difference between the book and the film was that in the book the Martians caught their own cold and dropped dead without any assistance from the human race or Jeff Goldblum, which may or may not be the same thing.
There, I announced. Done!
Incidentally, according to Cupcake, most of the discussion about War of the Worlds consisted of how much the book club members hated it.
