Karel Čapek's WAR WITH THE NEWTS (Tr Ewald Osers)

A reader might well think she's cracked into a heretofore unknown bit of Joseph Conrad in happy error when starting Karel Čapek's weird fiction classic War with the Newts, or maybe that she'd found an undiscovered H.P. Lovecraft story the old maniac actually allowed someone to edit down to ordinary English, but she'd be wrong either way, though she'd be very understandably wrong. Which is to say that our story begins with an "eccentric" merchant captain, Vantoch, rattling on about the impossibility of finding a pearl fishery that isn't fished out in a South Seas backwater of an archipelago he's been plying his trade around for years and also bitching about the inferiority of the native tribes thereabouts. 

But then the Devils those natives have been warning him about turn out to be real. 

Welcome to Karel Čapek not writing about robots, friends. 

Čapek, however, is not a 19th century social novelist/realist, but an early 20th century satirist. So we've hardly gotten to know our ship captain in the East Indies before we're swept along with him back home to Jevízčo, Bohemia-or-Czechoslovakia,* where sea captains are thin on the ground, and have met two beleaguered newspaper reporters who desperately hope to wring an interesting story out of him and who refer him to a local big-shot when he insists on trying to get them to invest in his pearl-fishing scheme. 

So far, so still kind-of Conrad, but then Čapek, by way of introducing us to the big-shot, tartly makes a pretty un-Conradian remark: "It is a well-known fact that the greater a man is the less he has on his door-plate" and then launches into a gentle lampoon on the lengthy and complex door-plates of others before telling us that this big-shot's simply has his last name, Bondy. And Bondy and Vantoch were at school together, where Vantoch bullied Bondy and I might as well get this out of the way, trigger warning for  some good old casual antisemitism; Vantoch bullied Bondy for being a "miserable little Jew" and continues that behavior in adulthood, even though he's hoping Bondy will finance his bizarre scheme: exploiting a strange, sentient and seagoing species of amphibians he found off an obscure island! Meaning this obnoxious bully was our first contact ambassador with non-human intelligence.

D'oh!

And before you can say "Prime Directive" Vantoch's crew have spread the news everywhere and Vantoch and Bondy have started an enterprise shipping starter populations of what Vantoch calls his "tapa-boys" -- soon generally referred to as Newts after much debate in the scientific community -- to pearl fisheries all over the place, arming them with steel tools to defend themselves from predators, and seeded lots of colonies of the beings to exploit for profit. Once those colonies are mature and incredibly productive (though they are human-sized and intelligent, these Newts still reproduce like ordinary amphibians, i.e. hundreds of children every year, almostall of which now survive to adulthood), the enterprise expands from pearl fishing to underwater engineering on an ever grander scale and the Newts are given and taught to use explosives, too. What could possibly go wrong?

Let's, just for fun,  ask the next cast of characters to interact with the Newts, a millionaire playboy, Abe Loeb, on a long-term pleasure cruise on his movie producer father's yacht with a gorgeous starlet named Lily Valley (but usually called by her sobriquet "Sweetiepie Li"), Abe's friend Baseball Fred and Fred's sensible girlfriend, Judy. This is not a major plot element but it might be my favorite interlude. Visiting an all but deserted island, the party have a bizarre encounter with the "tapa-boys" who by now are a full-blown cargo cult who believe that all humans like to be hissed at (Vantoch first communicated with them this way, summoning them with a "tst tst tst" that everybody is going to learn to fear when the Newts imitate it to get humans' attention) and will trade useful things like steel weapons for pearls. Sweetipie decides to accept their overtures as homage to her naked beauty (she's nude on the beach to taunt Abe and hold his attention while she pitches a movie script idea to him that will, of course, star her) and almost instantly weaves the Newt encounter into her movie ideas, fantasizing about being worshipped by the Newts as a goddess and not even beginning to entertain the idea that they might have been dangerous or meant her harm because look at all the pearls the Newts had scattered for her on the sand while Abe whisked her away to safety! The Newts, meanwhile,  only wanted knives, and then start parroting Abe's and Sweetiepie's exclamations. No, I'm not thinking "teke li-li, teke li-li" at all. You're thinking "teke li-li." 

All right, so am I.

I've got to get something off my chest now, for a moment. I realize Czechoslovakia was never drowning in resources and that life there was highly constrained in general for most if not all of the 20th century, but why, oh why, wasn't the great Vera "Daisies" Chytilová or Jaromil "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" Jires given all of the resources to adapt War with the Newts into a wild-ass Czech New Wave film with Jitka Cerhová as Judy and Ivana Karbanová as Sweetiepie Li at the very least?** It's seriously a shame, and whoever actually events time travel someday had better get on it.

Just, you know, don't let Hollywood anywhere near it or we'll get motion captured Andy Serkis playing all the Newts and Scarlett Johanssen as Sweetiepie and it'll get twisted into some grotesque and po-faced Cold War/War on Terror analogy. Or a Q-flavored conspiracy nightmare in which the Newts turn out actually to have been Mole Children all along, or some shit.

I'm, not, I feel, conveying here how thigh-slappingly funny -- and prescient at the same time -- this book is, though. It is indeed often thigh-slappingly funny and incredibly prescient. No other passages convey this quite as well as a scene in a London zoo which turns out to have had one of these sentient sea-dwelling Newts in its care all along -- and it has more or less accidentally learned to talk from listening to the conversations of people gawking at it, and later to read by peering over a caretaker's shoulder while he reads the newspaper. When the higher-ups discover this and bring in some Learned Experts to converse with it, well, how could I not think of our current AI bugaboos like ChatGPT, or at least Eliza of old?

How old are you?
I don't know. Do you want to look young? Wear a Libella bra.
What is today's date?
A: Monday. Lovely weather, sir. Gibraltar will be running at Epsom this Saturday.
Who reigns over England?
A: King George. God bless him.
Well done... Who is the greatest English writer?
A: Kipling.
Very good. Have you read anything by him?
A: No. How do you like Mae west?
We will ask the questions... What do you know of English history?
A: Henry the 8th.
What do you know about him?
A: Best film in recent years. Marvelous decor. Terrific spectacle.
Have you seen it? .
A: I haven't. Want to see England? Buy a Baby Ford.
What would you most like to see...?
A: The Oxford-Cambridge boat race, sir.
How many continents are there?
A: Five.
Very good. Which are they?
A: England and the rest.
Which are the rest?
A: The Bolsheviks and the Germans. And Italy.

I mean, at least it's not discussing the Final Solution. Quite. Yet.

Meanwhile, allowing the scientific and popular sensation over the Newts to distract the world -- and the reader -- Bondy and Vantoch have founded the innocuously named Pacific Export Company to exploit the naive new labor force that they scattered all over that ocean to breed into thriving populations around every island possible. But alas, in doing so, they have flooded the pearl market and such threats to their bottom line Will Not Do. And fateful business decisions are made... really, this whole novel is an argument against letting laissez fair capitalism make first contact or any decisions that will ultimately affect the whole world. Where's my "Karel warned us" tee shirt?

Furthermore, Čapek is very much taking the current temperature of Europe circa 1936; as the Newt-based economy matures and ramifies, crack-pated German scientists who have noted a paler-colored variant of the Newts in the Baltic Sea immediately reason back to a dubious finding that the species originally evolved on German soil, that the species degenerated as it spread to other parts of the world, and that the Baltic Sea variant demonstrates measurable superiority over Newts in other parts of the world because it is the most like the original Newt Race and I did not see this coming but of course. And yes, the notion of living space does arise, but not in the way one is thinking. 

As for the titular War, which only takes up the last 10-15% of the novel, Čapek gives us suitably dumb and ridiculous inciting incidents that aren't entirely a slave uprising but certainly could have been, with the Newts turning humanity's own tools against us and yes of course I wound up rooting for the Newts because capitalism.

Onward in the Radetzky March! I've still got novels from Romania, Austria, Slovenia, a short story collection from Croatia and more! Stay tuned...

*As the nation was known in 1936 when War with the Newts was published; it's in the modern day Czech Republic.

**I would also accept an animated Jan Švankmajer puppet extravaganza. I'm not unreasonable.