"Father,
the streets are empty!"
There
was much pulp literature around 1920 that used the threat or promise
of the Fourth Dimension as a context for excitement and adventure.
Many years ago I hacked this story out of an otherwise moribund volume
of Chatterbox.
The
Wooden Heads themselves were appealing with their slow, bumbling threats
to mankind, a sort of bloodless jolly version of the Zombie but with
as much liveliness as a skittle but closest to Dolls in contemporary
eyes . Hales's dull leaden prose and clunking plot lines were much
to my taste, and felt like an English equivalent of the Magritte
still lives of the period. Farmer's illustrations are capable and
cautious, and use clear stereotypes rather than visualising things
afresh. Farmer's style is the more appropriate for the depiction
of the end of Civilisation as we know it, not with a panache but
with a lifeless hatching that subdues the eye.
I
have assembled some of the illustrations in a small gallery if you
need persuading. The children struggling with the disembodied
tail of the dog caught between dimensions is a small miracle of drawing.
"What were the Wooden Heads?
Are
they still able to do mischief?
Can
they be prevented?"
Much
of the tension comes from the narrative device of having the children
advance forth regularly on a deserted and mysterious world as if to
sustain their regular way of life and indeed their school grades. One
boy reminds the other that their father was paying for a good private
education. Their mother, seemingly imprisoned within her four walls,
alternates between baking and frowning, under the sway of an imperturbable
and unimaginative husband. The pacing of the narrative is impressive,
a slow acceleration of threat and menace. London is surrounded by an
impenetrable fog outside which the Country Folk can only wring their
hands at the fate of the Metropolitans. The
season is late autumn, between September and October and the story
extends for months into the next year. With the dispoatch of the Wooden
Heads, the citizenry returns, oblivious to the months they spent in
limbo. The Wooden Heads remain a mystery to the end. There
is no attempt to locate their origins or purpose.They
have bright small but shifty eyes and die an unpleasant death.
The
author goes to great lengths to demonstrate how this respectable family
maintains its lawful conduct in a City where all restraints are removed.
Nothing is taken. Everything is paid for, with coins left on shelves
or piled beside the till. In the early stages, the family is even
polite but firm towards the Wooden Heads. When
the Father is finally roused to the danger the aliens present to his
family, his language is that of a strict but fair middle class male
trying to put his foot down.
The
extended coda to the story with reflections on the nature of media
and the demands of fame is overwritten but perhaps necessary to complete
the contractual length of the story. |