The Secret People

The Secret People is John Wyndham’s first novel, a pulpy adventure story about the civilization living under the Sahara Desert.  I should just lead with this — The Secret People wasn’t a particularly great book. It was most interesting to me reading every John Wyndham story, so I could see themes and ideas that appear in his later novels.

The Secret People takes place in Wyndham’s future, but feels like an alternate world reading this now. Our hero-to-be, Mark, is flying his mini helicopter plane around, the world visiting interesting cities and places. With Margaret, a pretty girl he met at his last hotel, he decides to visit the New Sea, which is the giant ocean the French and Italians are building in the Sahara Desert. The couple has a plane crash, fall down a whirlpool, and find themselves in an underground world.

It’s unabashedly a pulpy scifi adventure story, and The Secret People includes the best and the worst of that genre. The best because there’s a weird and wild new world to discover, without too much infodumping to  explain it. The worst because you don’t actually feel any tension in this  story, Mark and Margaret are clearly going to escape danger and be perfectly fine. It’s just that kind of genre fiction. 

One criticism of Wyndham’s later (and better) novels calls them “cozy catastrophes” which I’m starting to think means that nothing gross happens and there’s a happy couple at the end of the novel. I know this is meant to be pejorative, but who doesn’t want a non-gross scifi adventure  with a satisfying ending? In reviewing Chocky, and talking about Wyndham, Margaret Atwood says:

These books of his have been called “cozy catastrophes,” as the pair-bonded central figures make it through and then set up a fireside-and-slippers new beginning, but one might as well call World War II—of which Wyndham was a veteran—a “cozy” war because not everyone died in it.

I felt like The Secret People was a prototype of this kind of story. Look, Margaret ends up being more plot device than character, but when she does have agency, she uses it to befriend a kitty. (Important spoiler: The cat is just fine, too.) We get one scene of Margaret’s internal thoughts, where she makes the obligatory observation that our heroic protag is different from other men, he could be the one. Does she have a job? family? hobbies? Who knows! But she holds up under torture and is pretty capable throughout, so it’s better than it could be.

The secret people were humans who built underground caverns, where they developed mushroom farms and liquid light globes, and all kinds of things. But these technologies have been long forgotten, and it seems like like something bad has happened to reduce their population. The book has intriguing hints about how these secret people connect with our fairy tales and mythos, but unfortunately, these are never really answered. It’s frustrating to read because some of Wyndham’s other books use confusion, theories, and then a big reveal, and here, we just had cool possibilities (Egyptian gods! Fairy tale mushrooms! Future tech!) and characters expounding on their possible meanings.

The secret people never return to the surface, and anyone who accidentally arrives is shoved into a long-term prison to keep their society, well, secret. (The cave setting reminded me a bit of The Lotus Caves by John Christopher, although not nearly as developed.) Other prisoners in the caves explain how they’ve been there for years, and there are strange second-generation prisoners born here. It’s pretty racist here, I think because a pulpy adventure story often includes sketchily-developed secondary characters, and those quick sketches rely on a lot of unpleasantly dated assumptions. One character is an incredibly muscled African with Tarzan grammar, and even though he’s presented as a skilled and valuable ally to Mark, it’s still cringy to read his dialogue. There’s stereotyping all around, with a brash, mannerless American rounding out the group.

This is a cool concept for an adventure story, and in reading this one, you can really see how Wyndham developed as a writer. He’s thinking about mythology and alternate worlds here, but this isn’t really integrated with the plot, it’s mostly expressed through one character expounding on this.   But this book has pretty flat characters on that cool adventure, with some weird racist scenes.

 

Atwood, Margaret. “Chocky, the Kindly Body Snatcher” Slate Magazine, Slate, 8 Sept. 2015, slate.com/culture/2015/09/margaret-atwood-chocky-the-kindly-alien-invader-in-john-wyndhams-last-book.html.