The Midwich Cuckoo
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Wyndham does it again with 'The Midwich Cuckoo' where he provides a book that immediately captures the imagination and then keeps you hooked to the final resolution. His style is deceptively simple and yet the descriptions are rich and give full flesh to the story. The film 'Village Of The Damned' was based on this book ad if you know that film you will be aware of the basic premise. Without giving anything away, this book follows life in a village where everyone is rendered unconscious for a 24 hour period and on awakening all the females have become pregnant. We then see how the village deals with this unexpected occurrence and what happen once the babies start being born. The ending leaves you satisfied and clears up most loose ends and for a short novel this manages to pack in a lot of detail and intrigue. It is very stylised, based on post WW2 Britain, but non the weaker for it. If you like Sci-fi then this will be right up your street, but even for those who aren't too keen on that genre this is written with such verve and style that you can easily read and enjoy this in it's own right. Well worth a look.
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A gripping sinister read
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I loved this book. I'm quite a fan of sci-fi and I found this well-written and gripping. Definitely one of Wyndham's better novels.
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Unfortunately not as good as the book
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I agree with all the book reviews, Midwich Cuckoss is a classic of its time, and it is to this time that the radio play returns. It does a solid job of sticking to the original, but diverges a bit here and there in that some of the treatment of characters is more 'modern' i.e. weak men at fault due to their simplistic characters.
By the middle of this I was finding Bill Nighy too soft spoken for the role and didn't find that he easily conveyed the horror of the original. I aslo pondered how hard this would be to update in our modern connected real-time world.
I then deceided that the script writers had acheived modernisation by the increasingly stark treatment of male characters and at the end the resolution of the problem with the children is very much to the background, the narrative focus is very much the breakdown of relationships and male-female antoginism over fundamental issues of pregnancy, motherhood, fatherhood, anger, resentment and violince. The harsh differences in male and female response became almost bigger than the story of the cuckoos.
Overall then this didn't completely work for me, though I will dig out the novel and take stock of how John Wyndham originally proposed the characters would react.
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A thought-provoking classic
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One of John Wyndham's strongest novels. An imaginative basic idea of an exceptionally understated and subtle alien invasion, which in the wrong hands would be a B-movie idea, is handled with brilliant humanity and consistency by one of science-fiction's best ever writers. A classic.
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Gets you thinking
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I really enjoy Wyndham's take on sci-fi. He keeps it understated and by doing so makes things eerily real. The Midwich Cuckoos takes an incredible event (the impregnation, birth and development of apparently alien invaders) and rather than dealing with that mystery looks at how that event is dealt with on a religious level, political, local, national and international level. The story for me concerns responses. What can be done when something beyond our experience occurs.
I also get the impression that Wyndham is looking into our understanding of family. What are the bonds between parents and their children? How much control can and should be exerted over children? The children in the story start off in families, are abandoned, rejected, feared and ultimately destroyed. Family bonds are completely shattered. OK - in the story the children are alien but the story does challenge our accepted understanding of family and how far that can go.
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