The Man on Putney Hill

A week ago I used my employee discount to buy every H.G. Wells book Books a Million carried for less than fifteen dollars. Quite the gold mine if you ask me. With a new adaptation of The War of the Worlds on the way, I figured it would be the best book to start with. Here are some of my thoughts and observations regarding the book, and I’m curious to hear what others remember of reading it.

*** I can’t remember the last book I read that used dialogue so sparsely. Of course, this is natural when the protagonist finds himself isolated through much of the book. Nevertheless, it made a two-hundred page novel seem like a 500 page novel, despite the moments of page-turning intrigue.

*** I was shocked that a book written over a century ago seemed so accessible to a modern reader in terms of its prose. This marks the second “classic” novel I’ve read in the past several months (the other being Frankenstein) that didn’t turn off my deeply ingrained 21st century sensibility. It makes me extremely excited to read the rest of Wells’ offerings.

*** While the story lagged when the narrator became trapped in a demolished building, the last several chapters made me think about this book for the past several days; part of the reason I’m writing this is to get it out of my head after dwelling on it.

The seventh chapter of Part II is called The Man on Putney Hill. In this chapter, a recently freed and roaming narrator encounters a rifleman who he met earlier in the story. The rifleman confronts our dazed hero telling him to accept that they cannot match the technology and firepower of the Martians. He explains, quite eloquently, how mankind is no longer the prime occupant of Earth. The rifleman believes that mankind can persevere beneath the radar, within the tunnels below London, until they can learn enough to revolt against the Martians by turning their weapons against them.

As the rifleman’s plan unfolded, I found myself both interested and rationally drawn-in. The plan was both well thought out and executable. If the plan had a flaw, it was its coldness. It required mankind relinquishing its crown on the world stage and proceeding with survival being the main priority. “The meek shall inherit the Earth” goes right out the window in this new world. The strong will be responsible for the future of mankind. The weak are not capable of carrying such weight on their shoulders. Despite this coldness, I was engaged by his considerations of the future. Of course, since I see my universe as “vast and cool and unsympathetic,” I would naturally follow the rational basis for the rifleman’s plan.

But the narrator does not. In the concluding paragraph of the chapter, our humble narrator finds himself put off by the nihilistic viewpoint volunteered by the rifleman and deserts him, his decision bolstered by nothing but hope. The narrator felt he was betraying his wife and mankind by accepting defeat at the hands of the Martians. To him, wandering through the world in the hopes of better days (with no idea how they might come about) was the way to proceed with life. My reaction to this was two-fold: First, as a reader I felt ashamed, as the narrator did, for accepting the rifleman’s dark future. I admired the narrator’s idealism and courage (no matter how intellectually bankrupt it was) as he walked out into an uncertain future. The other part of me, the writer, was curious. The idea of a long, patient wait for the opportune moment of Martian weakness seemed an adequate and interesting way to go. When the narrator left at the end of the chapter, I was curious to see how the book would resolve itself.

The answer is unsatisfactorily. Before I even picked up this book I was familiar with the resolution – a terrestrial virus kills the invading Martian army. So, it wasn’t that aspect of the plot that irked me. The narrator, a scientific, philosophical man finds himself on his knees thanking God as the Martian army is killed and he is reunited with his wife, whom he had assumed dead. Faith seemed to be of little importance to the narrator in the book, so to find him praising the Lord at its conclusion is a rather unconvincing character arc. More importantly, the God as dues ex machina concludes a suspenseful novel with a shrug of the shoulders. Stephen King employed the same atrocious methods to his opus The Stand, as did Poe in The Pit and Pendulum. Both works left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

The philosophical quandaries exposed by the rifleman are much more compelling than the rescue from divine origins. What is man’s place in the world? Is it possible that we could be as ants to another species advanced beyond us? What would our sense of the species become if we were to find that the universe was not created just for us? Could we move on? How would we move on?

As the book concludes, the narrator has a vague sense of these questions, but is not forced to confront them because of God’s miraculous intervention. The bow-tied conclusion undercuts the ideas presented throughout the book. I often wonder if my lack of faith often comes out of this simplicity. Explaining tragedies and blessings equally as God’s will feels both minimalist and incongruous. And often time it rescues us from asking the deeper, darker questions that itch just beneath the surface. I’m curious to see if this summer’s film will ditch the divine hand for its conclusion. It could make the difference in my opinion of the film, as it did with this book.