both brothers as innocent points of view, reporters telling us what they saw. That they have emotions is merely incidental to their role as informants.

Wells relegates his ideas to the minor characters, carefully linking them to human imperfections so that the novel does not degenerate into sermon or essay. Probably the most interesting example of this is the artilleryman. In book one, chapter 11, the narrator, hiding inside his Woking house, sees a man trying to escape the Martians. He invites the man in and learns he is a soldier, “a driver in the artillery” (p. 62) whose unit has been wiped out by the Martians. The two separate in chapter 12, and we think we’ve seen the last of the artilleryman—until suddenly in book two, chapter 7, he reappears, and now it is he who extends hospitality to the narrator.

The artilleryman tells the narrator the Martians have developed a flying machine, information that sends the narrator into a depression. The artilleryman scoffs at his sadness and tells him he intends to survive. He has a plan for moving a community of survivors underground, into the drains below London. But who will be in that community? First, “able-bodied, clean-minded men” (p. 177), then:

Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want also—mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies—no blasted rolling eyes. We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race (p. 177).

This new underground race will be trained in science—“not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books” (p. 177)—in order to be able to combat the Martians and, ultimately, to assimilate their knowledge. The narrator is at first astounded at the rationality of the artilleryman’s program, but soon he notices flaws, not in the plan but in the artilleryman himself. He is a drunkard. Does this invalidate his ideas? Not in the slightest, but it does suggest that he is not the right person to put them into practice. With the benefit of hindsight we might suppose the right person would be Wells himself, since what the artilleryman says coincides so closely with what Wells espouses in Anticipations.

Three other figures stand out in the novel: the curate, Miss Elphinstone, and a “bearded, eagle-faced man.” The curate appears in book one, chapter 13, and stays with the narrator—whose adventures are interrupted by the chapters dedicated to the narrator’s brother—until book two, chapter 4. The curate represents everything wrong with the traditional order of society. He is a clergyman, automatically a target for Wells’s anticlericalism, but worse than that, he is incapable of accepting that the “rules” as he understands them no longer apply, that the Martian invasion has turned yesterday’s reality into a dream.

Wells’s depiction of the curate is virtually a parody of the self-satisfied, complacent social conformist:

His face was a fair weakness, his chin retreated, and his hair lay in crisp, almost flaxen curls on his low forehead; his eyes were rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring (p. 80).

In the context of Wells’s writing the curate is a late-nineteenth-century version of the Eloi the Time Traveller finds in the distant future. They too are blond, doll-like, and self-satisfied. Their fate is to be eaten by the Morlocks. The curate is more complex. First, he tries to fit the Martian invasion into his intellectual—that is, theological—training:

“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work—What are these Martians?” (p. 80).

The narrator can only respond with a question of his own: “What are we?” To understand new phenomena by automatically relating them to a code handed down from the past is, Wells asserts, impossible. The Martians are not a divine judgment but an invading force that must be understood and fought.

In the chapter that recounts his death, the curate has become a madman, alternating between fits of gluttony, in which he consumes as much food as he can, and religious hysteria, in which he blames himself for what has happened:

“It is just. On me and mine be the punishment laid. We have sinned, we have fallen short. There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust, and I held my peace.