The Problem of Freedom in John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy

The Tripods series, which I reviewed in my previous post, owes much of its appeal to a compelling central message: Freedom is Hard. Staying free of the alien Tripods' rule brings protagonist Will Parker and his friends neither honor nor comfort. Instead, the Capped, mind-controlled humans view them with suspicion, the Tripods try to capture or destroy them, and even if they elude enslavement they are excluded from such benefits as human civilization can offer. In The White Mountains, John Christopher uses Eloise to symbolize these benefits and their allure: Eloise, though Capped, is pretty and charming and offers Will a place among the landed gentry of post-invasion France. At least, she does until she decides to become a sacrifice to the Tripods. (In the television series, Eloise is played by Charlotte Long, who with rather unpleasant irony died in a car accident a few weeks after the BBC shot her scenes.) Will and Jean Paul and their fellow free men trade the comforts of home and hearth for a Spartan, fugitive life in the mountains, under military discipline and with little expectation of beating the invaders. This kind of dystopian realism appeals, I think, to bright and disaffected adolescents, but it raises an important question: does freedom carry any benefits that justify its huge costs?
  
In the trilogy, Will and his friends are too busy fighting the alien menace to ask this question, and Christopher himself only proposes a few answers to it. Free men control what Orwell called the few inches inside one's own skull. They don't have to share their most intimate space with an alien intelligence. Free men feel no desire to offer their children to the Masters as slaves or trophies, though Christopher's free men do have to steal children (or near-children) from the settlements of the Capped: they can apparently only increase their numbers by recruiting 13-year-old runaways.* The free men can also express an emotion, curiosity, that the aliens have denied to the Capped, which in turn allows them to ask hard questions about their social environment and to conduct scientific research. As in our own world, however, only a few actually do so: John Paul becomes a scientist, and Henry, in The Pool of Fire, travels to North America and learns there to regard humans as a single race rather than separate nations. (The Masters have preserved pre-invasion languages and nationalities to keep their human subjects divided.) Apart from Henry, though, the free men mainly value science as a source of more powerful weapons and vehicles, both necessary to fight the Tripods but dangerous once the Earth is free and human aggressiveness towards other humans reasserts itself.

Christopher makes this point in The City of Gold and Lead, when Will's Master tells him that pre-invasion humans could build bombs powerful enough to destroy entire cities. Will, focused on his spy mission, can't think far enough ahead to realize that such bombs could endanger more than the Tripods. Christopher returns to this point after the final defeat of the invaders, when the Council of Humanity collapses in nationalist bickering. But Christopher more or less ends his story there. What I wish he had done is explore Henry's discovery: that freedom means emancipation from more than one kind of mental slavery. If freedom is symbolized only by the raised fist, the flung grenade, or the ruins of an enemy city, how can it become compatible with the kind of peaceful and civilized life most of us want to lead? Does freedom mean more than merely smacking one's enemies about? If we were to ask Henry, he might say that freedom means the freedom to travel, to learn about other cultures and their ways of living, to realize that one's own ethnic group does not hold a monopoly on wisdom, and to recognize that people can choose nonviolence. John Paul would probably say freedom means the freedom to research subjects that are not immediately useful, to discover new facts and create new things beyond the ken of a docile, pre-industrial culture. Will, I think, would say that freedom means the freedom to be alone – to have privacy and solitude. His final decision to join Fritz and John Paul in creating a new league-of-nations movement represents a greater sacrifice than Christopher was able to articulate. 

In fairness, I don't see how the author could have written a compelling, action-packed YA novel about cultural exchange and diplomacy in the aftermath of a defeated alien invasion. I think this would make an intriguing storyline, but not for young people. Peace-making is primarily work for adults. As Faisal said at the end of Lawrence of Arabia, "The virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future," while "the vices of peace" - and its benefits - come from the labors of the old.


* This sounds creepier out of context than on the page; it is difficult to find even faint sexual allusions in Christopher's early YA novels.