Book Review: "War With the Newts" by Karel Čapek

It is well documented in World War Two that Karel Čapek was one of the people named as a public enemy of the Gestapo when his home country was invaded and he refused to leave or be silent. Upon pain of death, he sat in his place with the Gestapo looking for him and one of the reasons was because of this book. “War with the Newts” is a Sci-Fi novel in which these talking newts do all the menial jobs humans do not want to do, but at what cost? What happens when the newts unite and revolt against the oppressor? What happens when the oppressor becomes too powerful that they blur the lines between rights and responsibility so? Well, in this novel by Karel Čapek, there is something very clear about the way in which the newts are initially mistreated and then, revolution begins.

The language of the book is resonant of the way in which war first begins and the decline of civilisation tends to split poor and rich down the middle, leaving the poor without anything and fending for themselves. One thing I really like about this book is the way we are forced back and forth between these ‘groups’ of people and newts. Here are some of the quotations that I enjoyed most out of the book:

“It was a newspaper man’s dog days when nothing, absolutely nothing happens, when there are no politics, and not even a European crisis and yet even at this time of the year newspaper readers lying in the coma of boredom on the banks of rivers, or in the rare shade of trees demoralised by the heat, nature, country, peace, and as a whole by the healthy and simple life of the holidays, hope with daily disappointment that at least in the papers there will be something new and refreshing, some murder, war, an earthquake - in short, something; and if there isn’t they crumple up the papers and peevishly declare that there’s nothing in the papers, just Nothing at all, and on the whole they’re not worth reading and they won’t take them any longer.”

This is just a flavour of the book in which punctuation is scarce, but the way the book flows is amazing. It shows that there is a clear want to move quickly through society and so, when we read about the middle class not wanting to do the menial jobs, we can understand it at first. As the tension reaches higher and higher, the punctuation shifts and changes throughout the war and we get different speeds of everything as the newts play with the system. Even the system of the book itself.

“It said nothing, only shuffled from one foot to the other, and wriggled as a kid does when it’s shy. And round about in the water there was about two thousand of those lizards and they were sticking their little snouts out of the water and looking at me. And I - well, it’s true I was drink; well I squatted down and began to wriggle like that lizard so they weren’t frightened. And then another lizard crawled out from the water, about as big as a ten-year-old boy and it also began to shuffle like that. And in his front paw he held such a whacking pearl shell”

This is what the captain says about seeing these ‘lizards’ or ‘newts’ for the first time. It sort of subverts expectations a little because at first, you think that these newts are tiny and all over the place. But then you hear that one is as big as a ten-year-old boy and that is just the beginning of it. When the captain states that he was drunk, you find it hard to believe him but then again, you have to believe him because he’s the one that’s speaking and you really don’t have any one else as a reference point. When the captain talks, he does not just talk about their size but he also mentions what they can and cannot do. This only adds some reliability to his claims and scares the hell out of you because there are four to five foot lizards in the book and again - that is only the beginning of it.