Chapter 3: On Horsell Common
Overall: Some setup
I think there’s a bit of an interesting task in reading works that are so far removed from our present day. There’s certainly an amount of recontextualization that needs to occur in any attempt to read that text, and it’s interesting to me how perhaps some of our more modern (even relatively speaking) notions of proper chapter structure are really pretty fluid when placed against the breadth of literary history.
This is a set-up chapter. That is to say, not much “happens” in it. Our narrator arrives on Horsell Common where the cylinder has become something of a tourist attraction, and the narrator observes some of the goings-on surrounding this cylinder. From initial fascination, to attempts made to cordon it away from spectators for the time being.
I noticed this in Frankenstein as well, that there were some chapters which more deliberately felt like setup before a major event in the plot than others. While Wells is certainly even more about setup here than Shelley was, I think the structure may have just been a part of literature at the time, and that’s something I find more interesting than any specific thing that occurs in this chapter. I wonder if literature has changed over the years, and if so, how it has done so in structure as well as content. Wells’s stuff tends to feel more “cinematic” than Shelley’s, but even so these quiet moments begin to feel so much like setup that it’s hard to do chapter-by-chapter reviews of them. Thematically it is interesting to wonder how “hard” of science fiction this is, I suppose. Like, would this have been the procedure if a Martian cylinder landed in England in the 1890s? Call the lord who represents the region to come in from London and check it out, and generally wait for their word on what to do?
Ah well, some scattered thoughts. Next chapter is called “The Cylinder Opens” so I imagine it’ll be more to write about.
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