"Almost the only people I know who agree word for word on what they saw on the night of 15 July are Phyllis and I."

On the recommendation of the Caustic Cover Critic, who recently revealed that the oeuvre of John Wyndham extends far beyond his justly famous The Day of the Triffids (1951), in recent days I've been racing through some of what Wyndham described as his "logical science fiction" novels. Had Wyndham not named his style, I would probably have tagged it with something clunky like "It was a day like any other . . ." science fiction. In the Wyndham novels I've read so far--the aforementioned Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) (which is better known among American readers in its movie form, where it was called Village of the Damned), and The Kraken Wakes (1953), which I'm halfway through--space-borne entities of utterly inscrutable origin and intentions arrive and initiate a struggle for survival with the human race. What's so compelling about Wyndham's work is that by shifting the terms of our everyday life just a tiny bit he reveals--logically and convincingly--the shaky foundations and unquestioned assumptions on which our entire human world is based. It was an ordinary day . . . and then, again and again--sometimes suddenly, sometimes with dreadful, clawing slowness--it isn't.

I'll almost certainly have more to say about Wyndham in the coming months, as I work my way through the rest of his novels. For now, I simply want to share a great pasage from The Kraken Wakes. Whereas The Day of the Triffids is unrelenting in its tension, and The Midwich Cuckoos, though a bit more restrained, also rarely shifts its narrative attention from the creepy children at its core, The Kraken Wakes reads more like Wyndham's attempt to transplant Nick and Nora Charles into a particularly sharp episode of Lights Out. The couple who are its center are writers for the EBC, a commercial cousin of the BBC, and their comfortable banter offers considerable leaven to the slowly accumulating horrors of the first half of the novel.

This particular passage follows the late night-arrival of a couple of visiting friends, a husband and wife, and it shares the dry wit for which I praised Wyndham's prose earlier in the week--but with the addition of some finely honed thoughts about friendship and marriage, and a perfectly phrased observation to close it:

Wondering why one's friends chose to marry the people they did is unprofitable, but recurrent. One could so often have done so much better for them. For instance, I could think of three girls who would have been better for Harold, in their different ways; one would have pushed him, another would have looked after him, the third would have amused him. It is true that they were none of them quite as decorative as Tuny, but that's not--well, it's something like the difference between the room you live in and the one at the Ideal Home Exhibition. However, there it was, and, as Phyllis said, a girl who makes good with a name like Petunia must at least have something her parents didn't have.

Do you see why Wyndham has succeeded in enchanting me?

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Reading John Wyndham's creepy and well-conceived The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was later filmed as The Village of the Damned, brought me several unexpected pleasures.

1 I smiled at this sentence describing the sleepy hamlet of Midwich:

And before that it hit the headlines--well, anyway, the broadsheets--when Black Ned, a second-class highwayman, was shot on the steps of The Scythe and Stone Inn by Sweet Polly Parker, and although this gesture of reproof appears to have been of a more personal than social nature, she was, nevertheless, much lauded for it in the ballads of 1768.

Then I stopped, for it occurred to me that here was a perfect test of whether a reader is amenable to English literature: this droll, historically inclined sentence, which draws its arch-eyebrowed humor largely from its balanced, careful organization, seems characteristic of the dominant strain of the nation's literary output. A reader who pauses to enjoy this sentence might as well move on to Dickens, Thackeray, Waugh, Powell, Fitzgerald, and others. One who doesn't should probably plump for Dostoevsky or Melville instead.

2 As I was reading the book I realized that Ed's and my recent creation of the Invisible Library has unexpectedly added a new layer of drama to my reading. Early in the novel, the narrator refers to Midwich resident Gordon Zellaby's work of philosophy While We Last; soon after, Zellaby himself mentions that the manuscript for his next book, The British Twilight, is overdue.

I snapped to attention: would he--given the distractions posed by an infestation of possibly alien children--deliver the manuscript? Would The British Twilight ever be published--and thus available for stocking at the Invisible Library?

Sadly, John Wyndham seems to have been far less concerned about the fate of The British Twilight than I am, for the novel ends without a definite answer. Given, however, that nine years pass between the initial mention of the book and the conclusion of The Midwich Cuckoos, I decided, in my role as Invisible Librarian, that Zellaby--a professional philosopher--would surely have found the time to finish The British Twilight at some point. Thus a copy now resides on the "Z" shelf.

Did I make the right decision? Only Wyndham would know for sure, and he left this world nearly forty years ago; should his spirit visit the Library, I'll let you know.

3 Because I've had the Invisible Library on the brain this week, I also perked up at the following line spoken by a character:

What's going on here is the burning of books before they have been written.

The character is using books as a metaphor to describe the short-sightedness of the government's failure to study the alien children, but it also seems like a phrase one might find decorating one of the more cobwebby carrels in the Invisible Library.

It seems like it would go nicely that area of special collections that would house lost books like Profiles in String, the greatest work of X. Trapnel, the only manuscript of which was chucked into a Venetian canal by Pamela Widmerpool, because "it wasn't worthy of X."

Now any reader in possession of an Invisible Library card can see for himself whether Pamela was right . . . or whether perhaps the book was brilliant, and that was why it haunted her . . . if that was why, after Trapnel's death she admitted with a shiver, "I see that manuscript of his floating away on every canal."