Novel Review: The War in the Air by H.G. Wells

Apocryphal

The War in the Air by H.G. Wells, 1908, 260pp

This is not Well's most famous work by a longshot - it's quite likely you've never even heard of it. Wells wrote The War in the Air in 1907 at a time when he was veering away from the scientific romances of his past and into more mainstream fiction. Like his earlier novels, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, this book contains a fair amount of social commentary, but unlike those, this one is couched in some fairly lengthy 'editorial' sections by the unnamed narrator that will come across as rather dry and sometimes preachy. Wells was alarmed by the increase in nationalist rhetoric he was seeing around him, and this book forms part of his reaction to it.

The War in the Air postulates a near future world war, made possible by the atmosphere of fervent nationalism running wild in the various world empires, and by the sudden increase in mobility to the war departments of these nations made possible by air travel. Huge fleets or lighter-than-air ships are built - the battleships of the air - supported by rather unreliable heavier than air flying machines of variable invention that mostly get about by clumsily flapping their wings. The novel is set in the year '191-'

Please note that there are some spoilers ahead.

The story opens with two cockney brothers from Bun Hill, near the Crystal Palace in London. They're names are Bert and Tom Smallways. Tom is the more reserved of the two. He runs a shop and marvels (and laments) at the speed of change he sees in the world around him - a world of motorcycles, automobiles, and monorails and exotic fruits and vegetables from all around the world. Bert Smallways, on the other hand, is the more progressive of the two. He'll be the hero of our story. He's employed in the bicycle (here meaning motorcycle) shop of a young man named Grubb, which satisfied his progressive nature. But a motorcycle accident and a fire in the early chapters of the book sets Bert and Grubb back. For a time they take to touring the countryside and singing. Meanwhile, the news headlines offer dire predictions of war, and a certain English inventor named Butteridge is making a name for himself.

All of these threads are drawn together one day as Mr Butteridge comes floating across Bert's path in a balloon. Mistakes are made, and before you know it Bert Smallways is carried off solo in Butteridge's balloon. He drifts across the North Sea and into northern Germany, where he eventually lands with a ruckus. The Germans assume he's Mr Butteridge himself, and since this assumption seems to be the only thing saving Bert from some German anger over the extent of property damage he created in landing, he doesn't tell them who he really is. Almost before he can say 'Gaw!', Bert finds himself in Prince Karl Albert's air flagship, the Vaterland, and heading out over the sea toward America.

It turns out the Germans have plans of invasion for North America, and almost before Bert understands what he's involved in, he witnesses a naval battle between American and German ironclads in the North Atlantic. At first this all seems like something happening remotely below, but soon it becomes obvious he's part of an air fleet, which means he's part of the action. Here we get some of the best bits of description in the book:

"Bert, craning his neck through the cabin porthole, saw the whole of that incident, that first encounter of aeroplane and ironclad. He saw the queer German Drachenflieger, with their wide flat wings and square, box-shaped heads, their wheeled bodies, and their single-man riders soar down the air like a flight of birds... One to the right pitched down extravagantly, shot steeply up into the air, burst with a loud report, and flamed down into the sea; another plunged nose forward into the water and seemed to fly to pieces as it hit the waves."

Somewhere in the book, we're told that about a third of all these heavier-than-air flying machines killed their solo pilots. Clearly, the new air force isn't the place for the faint of heart. Bert feels unsafe, even in the relative safety of the airship, though he's later dismayed to learn that a young man was shot dead by a stray rifle bullet, though this whole time he never realized the Vaterland had come under fire. Meanwhile, the battle rages on:

"He saw little men on the deck of the Theodore Roosevelt below, men foreshortened in plan into mere heads and feet, running out preparing to shoot at the [other Drachenflieger]. Then the foremost flying machine was rushing between Bert and the American deck, and then bang! came the thunder of its bomb flung neatly at the forward barbette and a thin little crackling of rifle shots in reply. Whack whack whack, went the quick-firing guns of the American's battery and smash came the answering shell from the Fuerst Bismarck. Then a second and third flying-machine passed between Burt and the American ironclad, dropping bombs also, and a fourth, it's rider hit by a bullet, reeled down and dashed itself to pieces and exploded between the shot-torn funnels, blowing them apart. Bert had a momentary glimpse of a little black creature jumping from the crumpling frame of the flying machine, hitting the funnel, and falling limply, to be instantly caught and driven to nothingness by the blaze and rush of explosion."

In these sections, it reads very like a comic book, right down to the sound effects.

"Smash! came a vast explosion in the forward part of the flagship, and a huge piece of metalwork seemed to lift out of her and dump itself into the sea, dropping men and leaving a gap into which a prompt Drachenflieger planted a flaring bomb. And then for an instant Bert perceived only too clearly in the growing, pitiless light a number of minute, convulsively active animalculae scorched and struggling in the Theodore Roosevelt's foaming wake. What were they? Not men - surely not men? Those drowning, mangled little creatures tore with their clutching fingers at Bert's soul."

By now, Prince Karl Albert knows that Bert isn't the famed airship inventor, Butteridge. Bert is allowed to live on the ship for the time being, but it's made clear to him that his role on the ship is now 'als ballast'. He tries to keep a low profile, especially when the Prince is angry. After leaving the sea battle behind them, the air fleet heads toward New York. Along the way, word comes that a German airman is to be disciplined for carrying matches while onboard the airship, Adler. This is extremely dangerous and there are signs posted about warning men not to carry matches. The airman pleads forgetfulness in the height of battle, but the Prince decides to make an example of him anyway.

"Bert stood on the gallery, curious to see the execution, but uncomfortable because that terrible blond Prince was within a dozen feet of him, glaring terribly, with his arms folded and his heels together in military fashion.
They hung the man from the Adler. They gave him sixty feet of rope, so that he should hang and dangle in the sight of all evil-doers who might be hiding matches or contemplating any kindred disobedience. Bart saw the man standing, a living, reluctant man, no doubt scared and rebellious enough in his heart, but outwardly erect and obedient, on the lower gallery of the Adler about a hundred yards away. Then they thrust him overboard...
Down he fell, hands and feet extended, until with a jerk he was at the end of the rope. Then he ought to have died and swung edifyingly, but instead a more terrible thing happened; his head came right off, and down the body went spinning into the sea, feeble, grotesque, fantastic, and with the head racing it in its fall."

The Vaterland heads on to New York, where at first the city surrenders, but then the American Spirit kicks up and, when reinforcements arrive from the south, the battle of New York begins. The Vaterland sustains damage and must leave the battle behind. It flies or drifts of to Labrador, where it settles down in the serene Canadian wilderness for a time. Rescue eventually comes, and the German fleet heads down to Niagara Falls, where most of the rest of the story is spun. The Germans take both sides of the river (here, for some reason, Wells refers to 'Niagara City' even though the cities on both sides of the river were called Niagara Falls at this time). By now we've learned that the whole world it at war - Paris, London, Berlin, New York, and other cities have all been fire-bombed out of existence. The 'Asiatics' (seemingly China, Japan, and India, described as advanced and industrious people who are more numerous and advanced than everyone else) have joined the fray and taken the west part of North America. There is a three-way war on for North America.

Toward the end, Bert finds himself stranded on Goat Island, the island above Niagara Falls that separates the American Falls from the Horseshoe Falls. From this island, he witnesses another aerial battle between the German fleet and the Asiatics. A crashing airship takes out the bridge, and for him there's no immediate way off. He soon discovers he isn't alone on the island - Prince Karl Albert is here as well as a German officer. Eventually, he must confront these two and find a way off the island. Wells is clearly familiar with the Falls area, and finishes this chapter with a poignant description of the Whirlpool, which lies downstream in the Niagara Gorge. This is where all kinds of debris that falls over the falls tends to collect. Wells seems to liken this to the sweep of great events:

"...The [missing] bird-faced officer was already rubbing shoulders with certain inert matter that had once been Lieutenant Kurt and the Chinese aeronaut and a dead cow, and much other uncongenial company, in the huge circle of the Whirlpool two and a quarter miles away. Never had that great gathering place, that incessant, aimless, unprogressive hurry of waste and battered things been so crowded with strange and melancholy derelicts. Round they went and round, and every day brought it's new contributions, luckless brutes, shattered fragments of boat and flying-machine, endless citizens from the cities upon the shores of the great lakes above. Much came from Cleveland. It all gathered here, and whirled about indefinitely, and over it all gathered daily a greater abundance of birds."

We follow Bert a little longer after his escape from the island, but soon it seems that Wells tires of telling the tale from Bert's perspective, and much of the rest of it is narrated as if to move it along to its point. The book ends with and epilogue, which takes us back to Tom Smallways in Bun Hill, some 30 years on, who shares his perspective on the last 30 years and the World War (which may still be being waged in some far off land) to his nephew, Teddy - Bert's youngest son. The book concludes:

"[Tom] sucked his old gums thoughtfully, and his gaze strayed away across the valley to where the shattered glass of the Crystal Palace glittered in the sun. A dim, large sense of waste and irrevocably lost opportunities pervaded his mind. He repeated his ultimate judgment upon all these things, obstinately, slowly, and conclusively, his final saying on the matter.
'You can say whay you like,' he said. 'It didn't ought ever to 'ave begin.'
He said it simply - somebody somewhere ought to have stopped something, but who or how or why were beyond all his ken."

Now, I'm sure that sounds heavy handed, but keep in mind all of this was written shortly before the First World War. Wells, in his way, foresaw air battles and the fire bombing of cities. He saw where nationalism was going.

As a pure story, The War in the Air has a lot of problems. There's far too much exposition by the narrator, and this can cause parts of the story to drag. Many of the action scenes are quite good, but I'm not convinced by Well's use of onomatopoeic words to illustrate that action - though as I said, it does put me in mind of how it's done in graphic novels.

So yes, as a novel it's flawed - but there's so much more in here than just a story! We've got a likeable everyman who gets swept up into bigger events (long before Frodo ever did, and one cant help but wonder how much Smallways, Grubb, and Butteridge influenced The Shire), dramatic battles in the air, exotic locations, a climax on an island surrounded by deadly waterfalls, social commentary, anti-war sentiment, and some eerily accurate predictions of what was to come. As prolific SF&F author Dave Duncan says in the introduction to this edition: "Strangely, The War in the Air is not even counted among H.G. Wells's best, but coming from anyone else it would be called a masterpiece. It deserves to be better remembered."

What can I say, but that I agree!