The Strange Invaders - Alun Llewellyn's Lizard Apocalypse
The original 1934 edition of Alun Llewellyn's The Strange Invaders is indeed a thing of cult beauty. Its front cover depicts in eerie detail a leering reptile of prehistoric proportions perched on the broken masonry of a devastated settlement, terrified villagers fleeing in its wake. On the book's spine in green lettering reads the pulp-like subtitle: 'a weird exciting tale'. Such a lurid design might appear to anticipate those trashy monster invasion stories that would become so popular in the 1950s but thankfully Llewellyn's offering proves to be a far more sophisticated literary beast.
The Strange Invaders is a dark fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic future where civilization has crumbled and man fallen into a neo-dark age. Only a few pockets of humanity remain and they are under increasing threat from another ice-age. Llewellyn focuses on one such community dwelling in a ruined city on the fringes of a vast Russian plain. Governed by a sinister patriarchal religious group: the Fathers, and policed by a barbarian-like force: the Swords, its citizens have become cowed and ignorant. Eking out a meagre existence, they worship the new holy trinity of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. As if their lives aren't miserable enough - out there in the wilderness beyond, at first only in rumour but then in horrifying reality, exists a race of giant man-eating lizards.
So what's going on? Bad science? Proto-Jurassic Park fantasy? Freudian nightmare? The answer of course is much more dangerous - politics.
Llewellyn's novel is a profoundly political work, allegorizing the collision of two massive conflicting ideologies in the 1930s. A vulnerable isolated settlement short on supplies beset by dark rumours of bestial forces might just as well have been Britain during the depression, collectively tuned to a crackling wireless-set hearing grim news of the rise of Hitler and Stalin. The salient mood here is one of intense paranoia.
As in any good horror story the reader is fully aware that these monstrous lizards will eventually arrive just as surely as Llewellyn knew the Second World War would inevitably come. It is just a question of time, a dynamic skilfully exploited by the author to engender a claustrophobic tension that on occasions is almost unbearable.
As an early allegory warning of the dangers of totalitarianism The Strange Invaders is an incredibly powerful work. Unlike HG Wells in his The Shape of Things to Come (1933) published the previous year, Llewellyn wasn't especially concerned with predicting the finer details of how WW2 might break out. He was much more interested in demonstrating how perverse mechanistic systems of government and human-less ideologies can unleash potentially devastating forces upon mankind and his environment.
In this respect he anticipates the writings of George Orwell. Even his use of a kind of shorthand to define important events and institutions: the Faith, the Destruction, the Fathers etc foreshadows 1984's Newspeak. The Fathers function as a kind of Big Brother brainwashing the people and keeping them ignorant - they represent the controlling influence of the State. And, just as Orwell would use beasts as metaphor in Animal Farm, Llewellyn's giant lizards - cold blooded, machine-like and without minds, are entirely symbolic.
It is this question of 'mind' that most preoccupies the author. With the world sliding ever nearer another catastrophic war, The Strange Invaders reads like a desperate call for rationality. Fundamentally this is a liberal humanist text - nothing less than the fate of humanity is at its core. It is worth noting that Llewellyn stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party in 1931 and 1935.
From the outset the author has an anthropological interest in how human instincts and prejudices survive even in extreme circumstances. We observe love, sexual jealousy, ambition, racial tension, all continuing to function in his bleak post-apocalyptic world. The most disturbing scene in the entire book depicts the mass slaughter of Tarters (Oriental) by the Rus-folk (Caucasian) in a prescient warning of a racial holocaust. Llewellyn who worked as a treaty translator and reviser for the League of Nations from 1936 to 1939 would surely have been aware of the ever worsening plight of the Jews in 1930s Nazi Germany. He was certainly aware of the League's impotence.
The ecological damage brought about by war is everywhere present in this book. The aridity of the plains reminds one of Eliot's Waste Land; the creeping ice-age is more than a functional device to create a tense 'time running out' atmosphere, it is intended as a stark warning of the chaos that man can reek upon his environment through violence and mechanization. Make no mistake this is an environmental novel.
But why giant lizards? Well obviously they represent atavism - a return to a pre-civilized, pre-man centred world. Their gigantism, their very monstrosity underlining a backward evolutionary step. We can also detect a Darwinian paranoia that man is no longer the dominant species, not just out of harmony with nature but pitted against it - humanity engaging in a survival of the fittest battle with a reptilian super-race.
But it is in mythology that the strongest symbolism lay. This century's explosion of dinosaur culture has to a certain extent superceded dragon superstition, which in turn, was a later manifestation of the biblical representation of the snake as evil. The Christian myth of the fall of Man is clearly a source for this allegory. Adun Bayatan (the central character), AB, is a kind of first man, a fallen Adam, cast out into the wilderness. In essence the lizards represent the serpent in the Garden of Eden run amok, the devil made manifest. The key difference however is that rebellion in Llewellyn's work is seen as a positive. In Adun Bayatan's ability to rebel and to love lay the only hope for humanity. In fact through Adun's passion for Erya, love acts as the catalyst for rebellion. Again Llewellyn anticipates Orwell's Winston Smith.
It is perhaps a psychological inevitability that such an apocalyptic vision should mask or act as a counterbalance to a hidden idealistic concept of the world. A glimpse of Llewellyn's own Eden could be seen in 1969. In that year he wrote the gazeteer and bulk of the Shell Guide to Wales (Wynford Vaughan Thomas penned the introduction). There we find a perfectly ordered place, beautiful and magical. It is interesting to read the large entry for Machynlleth the home of his parents and grandparents. However in his brief introduction to the book we detect a familiar sense of unease. He bemoans the Forestry Commission's altering of the landscape; the creeping appearance of electricity pylons; and a London government's decision to drown Welsh valleys to slake the thirst of English industrial cities. Once again we sense that feeling of vulnerability, of a dangerous force out there gradually moving in, invading our lives.
Llewellyn ended his days in Ireland, even becoming an Irish citizen. Why did he turn his back on Britain? He'd failed at the League of Nations to stop WW2; he'd failed to get into parliament as a Liberal MP; politics in Britain had become increasingly polarized between left and right; even his beloved Wales was under threat and could not be fixed in time.
The Strange Invaders was Alun Llewellyn's only work of science fiction. The book was reprinted in 1977 with an introduction by Brian Aldiss.
© Anthony Brockway 2003