The novel “The Strange Invaders” by Alun Llewellyn was published for the first time in 1934.
The caravan that must bring supplies is late and, while waiting to see it on the horizon, Adun thinks about Erya, a girl he likes. Unfortunately Karasoin, the head of the House of Swords, noticed her beauty as well and he has a lot more consideration than Adun among the Fathers.
The situation gets worse with the arrival of a horde of Tartars. They claim that they are not looking for a city to plunder but are fleeing monsters. The Fathers don’t believe those stories because in their doctrine there is no mention of these monsters and rely on the Faith in the trinity of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
Alun Llewellyn was a lawyer who occasionally was a writer and in the course of his life he was active in various literary genres. He was interested in politics both by being a candidate for various offices and writing satire. He traveled to the then USSR to see in person the development of communism and the negative impression he received became part of some of his works.
In the novel “The Strange Invaders” Alun Llewellyn takes some elements of the Soviet communist regime developing them in a post-apocalyptic story that in 1934 already had a good tradition in UK. Especially the cult of the communist leaders’ personality takes one last step in getting through and through one of the foundations of a religion devout to a trinity composed by Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
In the future in which the novel is set, a new ice age hit the Earth and what was the USSR degenerated into a pre-industrial society fragmented into city-states and nomadic tribes. The city where most of the story is set is directed by the Church that defends the faith in the communist trinity, whose power is supported by the Swords, the small city army.
The city is also dependent on regular supplies arriving via a caravan but a crisis begins when it’s late and some Tartars bring the city a man who seems to be the only survivor of the caravan. Because of what he says he’s taken for a madman but soon later the Tartars arrive en masse running away from monsters.
Following the story of Adun, a common man, and that of Karasoin, the head of the House of Swords, united only by their interest in Erya, Alun Llewellyn describes how that small society works. The various powers are in a balance but that’s destabilized with different consequences and different reactions from different people.
The Fathers strictly follow the orthodoxy of the doctrines left them by Marx, Lenin and Stalin and don’t believe in the existence of giant reptiles because nothing of the kind is described in the doctrine. Adun and Karasoin’s attitude is far more practical because the two of them are interested in saving people and Karasoin resents the Fathers’ power.
The crisis leads Adun and Karasoin to cooperate and in some way to respect each other but the differences between the two of them and their interest in Erya generates at the same time a lot of tension between theem. The novel describes a very male-dominated society and was written when strong female characters were out of the ordinary and Erya is no exception. The girl merely expresses a desire for independence but for the rest she’s a rather weak character.
On the other hand, “The Strange Invaders” isn’t a story of heroes, although among the symbolisms that you can see there is that of the knights against the dragons. Even the protagonists who try to save the inhabitants of the city are far from spotless. Actually that’s positive in the sense that these are people all in all normal, with their strengths and weaknesses, not stereotypes.
The inclusion of subtleties that allow various interpretations of the novel’s elements is in general a good thing. Alun Llewellyn doesn’t just tell a trivial post-apocalyptic adventure but uses it to tell a story that can contain several social and political elements while not very long.
It’s for these reasons that I think “The Strange Invaders” is a good novel despite its age. The contents are still interesting today so it can be considered a classic forgotten for a long time and somehow rediscovered by Brian Aldiss some years ago.
