Having recently finished "The War of the Worlds", I ask myself what it is about Atwood's novel that pulls me along while I had the feeling of having to work quite hard to finish Wells', despite it being quite thin. It's not the complexity of the writing. If anything, Atwood's writing is more complex - certainly more psychologically complex (although Wells shows some lovely flashes of insight) - and Wells created a good story, which should be motivating for the reader.
Both stories are written in the first person. This feels very natural and, in Atwood's book, creates, for me, a real sense of identification with the central character, but I found Wells' to be more distant, despite the first person point of view and the desperate circumstances in which he finds himself. This sense of identification is not the result of one having been written closer to my time than the other, either. For instance, I almost always found Jane Austen's books as 'compulsively readable' as this one by Atwood. I was reminded of this when I read a blog this morning by Scott D. Southard (Check it out if you are a Jane Austen fan).
Wells' book was serialised, of course, and this appears to have affected the narrative structure. There was an economic imperative here, and I think this works against the art. Is each chapter intended to be read with an interval between? There's a sense of 'the story so far..' about it. Atwood's feels more like a single sitting narrative, with forced breaks when (my) domestic life intrudes.
Both stories engage the intellect, although Atwood's does this more smoothly, without distancing the reader from the narrative. Wells' writing feels more cerebral. Atwood's is able to create a real sense of being trapped in a society that is structured for restraint, self-sustaining, dispersed, and where the enemy seems amorphous, embedded, even carried within, causing paths to escape to dissolve, even as they open up. Wells' enemy is more discrete and there is always the possibility of defeat and a return to 'normality' of a kind, albeit with an altered sense of the possible. Plus Wells' central character is a man of education and privilege, and restoration of his position is ultimately restoration of the status quo of English society at that time. I suppose women - and Atwell's book might be labelled a feminist novel - have never really been able to relax into their tenuous emancipation. It seems to be constantly under challenge. This can be exhausting. The alternative of giving up the ongoing work to simply maintain a level of social and economic equality can occasionally seem quite attractive. The imaginative journey to the end result of this temptation, is undertaken in the book. I found it interesting that the book was copyrighted 1985, with the historical period in gender politics and economics providing another level of meaning to the text. So the novel pre-empts the return to a fundamentalist religious conservatism as a political force that is, even now, working from the top down to change society through lobbied legislative changes. Perhaps all this is what provides the high stakes, for this reader at least.
Ultimately the pulling power of the novel is the engine that drives the narrative. The engine is fueled by what is at stake for the reader, and not just for the novel's protagonists. The stakes are high in "The War of the Worlds." Those in "The Handmaid's Tale" are both high and credible in our contemporary world. This, I believe, makes it compulsive, if not compulsory reading.
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