The Kraken Wakes

One of my favorite discoveries last year was John Wyndham, an English author of sci-fi thrillers and an uncommonly skillful writer. Back around Christmas I read two of his most famous novels, The Day of the Triffids, in which a worldwide medical disaster turns into an apocalypse thanks to man-eating plants, and The Midwich Cuckoos, in which a small English village slowly figures out that it is the incubator of an otherworldly species’ young. I found these so brilliantly constructed, so subtle, and so absorbing that I got several more of Wyndham’s books with a Christmas gift card or two. I finally got to one of these last month: The Kraken Wakes.

This novel begins, like the other two, with an odd minor incident that the characters only realize later is the first forewarning of catastrophe. Mike and Phyllis Watson, young newlyweds and both reporters for the EBC, an upstart rival to the BBC, are honeymooning on an Atlantic cruise when they sight strange red dots in the sky. The brightly glowing vessels, which can’t be described in any particular detail by any witness and seem to radiate heat, draw closer to both the ship and the ocean before plunging into the water and disappearing. Mike and Phyllis report it as a curiosity, a brief notice to round out the evening news.

Then more of the lights appear. And more. They come out of the sky, dive under the ocean, and no witness ever sees one come back up.

By dint of having been there for one of the first sightings, Mike accidentally becomes a sought-after commentator on the flying red lights. A friend from the Admiralty shows Mike a chart of recorded sightings, which cluster over the deepest parts of the world’s oceans. Whatever this is, it’s not random. Scientists weigh in—and argue, and attack each other. Despite the controversy, no one knows what the lights are but after sightings all over the world, they stop. With their novelty and even their utility as the object of worry used up, the red lights become old news and the public moves on.

Then strange things start happening to the ocean. Vast clouds of mud from the ocean floor—specifically from the abyssal deeps where the glowing red lights had disappeared—cloud the major currents and disrupt fishing. Submarines and bathyspheres lowered to take a look are lost with their crews. Naval vessels explode and sink, and soon cargo ships and passenger liners start sinking. Most disturbingly, small settlements on out-of-the-way islands are found abandoned, their populations never to be seen again.

Mike and Phyllis, through the ups and downs of their journalistic careers and personal lives, witness much of this. And after joining the research team of a controversial scientist whose theories about the origins and goals of the undersea invaders are widely mocked but turn out to be correct more and more often, they become the first people to see and survive whatever is causing coastal populations to disappear. This scene—vividly rendered for the cover of the old Penguin paperback edition (see below)—is one of the most chilling and horrific in any of Wyndham’s books.

Finally, and seemingly too late, the world’s governments fight back. The coastal attacks stop. And the ice caps start melting.

While we haven’t lost our appetite for imagined apocalypse since Wyndham wrote in the 1950s and 60s, some threats have become passé. The large-scale alien invasion seems to be one. If any vision of the end of the world is bound to a former period of our culture, that one—with its fleets of flying saucers, desperate human armies, scientists fretting in labs, generals sweating in bunkers, and “Take me to your leader”—seems utterly inseparable from the early Cold War.

With The Kraken Wakes, which was published in 1953, Wyndham seems to have already sensed this emerging cliché and dodged it. His aliens are never seen and never once communicate with mankind. Their objectives can be inferred only after the fact, based on what they’ve already done, and don’t align with any understandable human goals. They remain alien throughout.

All of which keeps The Kraken Wakes surprising and original. These aliens prove canny and unpredictable and seem to have the upper hand until the very end.

But what keeps the novel’s story engaging, and is one of the most unusual things about it, is Mike’s narration. Wyndham presents the novel as Mike’s account, written down for a readership he may never know, of the catastrophes of the last several years and how and why society has collapsed into isolated bands hiding among islands that used to be hills. Technically, the overwhelming majority of The Kraken Wakes is told through exposition. But Wyndham structures these lengthy histories with crucial scenes of Mike and Phyllis’s work, travels, and personal life, and all of it is plausibly imagined and vividly written. The Watsons’ voyage from a flooded London to the Cotswolds by motor boat, finding their way using half-submerged steeples as landmarks and sleeping in the dry upper stories of abandoned houses, is an outstanding piece of post-apocalyptic writing all by itself. It’s a brilliant miniature of what Wyndham does at novel length in The Day of the Triffids.

My Modern Library paperback describes The Kraken Wakes as “an ingenious early example of climate fiction,” which is a modish thing to say but exactly wrong. The real, pervasive concern throughout the novel, as exemplified by Mike and Phyllis’s work for the EBC, is not climate change but journalism and public opinion. Reporters and governments live in a constant struggle not only with the submarine aliens but with a distracted public whose attention can only be attracted for more than a few minutes by novelty, outrage, or crisis.

Alexandra Kleeman, in a passage of her introduction blurbed on the back cover, is more perceptive. Focusing on a side character named Petunia, who has her own insistently held opinions about the aliens (it’s a Russian ploy), Kleeman suggests that Wyndham offers prescient insight into “anti-vaxxer disinformation and QAnon conspiracists.” Sure, maybe. But if so, Wyndham also correctly shows that this distrust cuts both ways. The government and military repeatedly attempt to control the flow of upsetting information and manipulate—some might say nudge—the public into compliance and approved opinions. But public opinion proves fickle, unpredictable, and intractable. Efforts to control it and save face for embarrassed governments and overconfident scientists don’t go well, something that will come as no surprise after the last few years.

There’s much more to The Kraken Wakes than its excellent writing and thematic insight. I haven’t even mentioned its humor, which is both wryly ironic and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Wyndham has great fun poking at Soviet pomposity, anti-capitalist paranoia, and Lysenkoism, among many other targets. And Wyndham, a master of the slow burn, uses his skill in building dread and foreboding to maximum effect.

But what is most important about The Kraken Wakes is that it is vividly imagined, thrilling, and surprising. Tastes in apocalypse—aliens, zombies, viruses, climate change—will shift and the literary establishment will politicize old books, but a good story well told will outlast both trends and politics. And the survival of storytelling beyond these and the apocalypse, as Mike’s narrative survives the floods, is a real reason for hope.