H.G Wells - The War of the Worlds

(Source)

Hey guys, today's review is on the H.G. Wells science fiction novel The War of the Worlds.

I will be 100% honest with you, I had not heard of this until I watched Carrie Hope Fletcher's video where she explains that she is going to be in the musical version of the show (which I believe starts this month). 

This book is dubbed as one of the first to be written about mankind and the extraterrestrial race, it originally being written in the late 1800's. 

This book comes in two parts, book one - The Coming of the Martians and book two - The Earth Under The Martians. The copy I had had a lot more information about the author and behind the science kind of stuff on it as well.

I have to be 100% honest with you, I have no idea what I think of this book even though I have just  read it. You have to remember that this was written before the world got sci-fi crazy, aliens etc were not written about or thought about too much, so in that sense the book is very clever and imaginative. 

On the other hand, I am living in 2014 and have seen/read a lot of unbelievable things that this just failed to impress me, as I heard it would do.

Curse of being in the 21st century I guess.

I just didn't connect to the characters at all, whether the aliens killed them or not was neither here nor there. When a person turned up dead I was less upset than when it talked about the bones of an animal, or a hungry stray dog.

Then the very end baffled me.

 (SPOILER ALERT)

...

...

...

...

...

...

The wife, was she alive, was she dead - was the narrator alive or dead?

I don't know. I spent all morning googling and couldn't come up with an answer, in the musical version I've heard the wife dies, but nothing was said about the narrator. In the book I couldn't decide if she had somehow miraculously escaped OR they were both ghosts. 

When I finished the book I was left in a state of "I don't know what to think about that?"

As I said before for the time it was written it is very clever, but I just couldn't get into it.

It seemed rather jumpy, no connection to the main character, or reason why these creatures from Mars had attacked Earth, what they were building or how they suddenly just died - which I know it's explained how they died but why so suddenly like that.

It left me with a lot of questions, questions that Google cannot answer because I don't know how to word them correctly. 

I can honestly say a book has never confused me as much as this one has, add the fact that when I was searching Google I came up with films and the musical - which are only based off of this book, so completely different in a lot of ways, that was too much at 5am for my brain.

I may one day return to this book and re-read it, see if a second reading can make more sense of it, but for now I'm left absolutely clueless about what to think of it.

You can get this book for as little as £2.28 on Amazon. 

Have you read this book? What's your opinions?

If you loved it, what am I missing?

xx