War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We’re Here Because You Were There

Not many go unscathed in the comic sarcasm of The War with the Newts: most European nationalities (Dutch and Czech in particular), Americans (especially Hollywood types and Yale alumni), most Asians, religious enthusiasts (including Jews, Catholics, and militant atheists), and all seamen, academics, and newspapermen are castigated by Čapek without mercy. But his primary target is the emerging global capitalism of the early 20th century. I doubt any other work of fiction has captured either the process or the consequences of unrestrained commercial exploitation better than Čapek - consequences for the exploiters as well as the exploited.

By teaching a peculiar species of aquatic lizard to protect themselves from sharks in exchange for pearls, modern industrial freebooters unwittingly create a competitor-civilisation. The hapless capitalists do not realise that there are what economists call ‘externalities’ or unintended secondary effects of their passionate but ultimately pointless ambitions. The resources they acquire from the newts are worthless except to produce more products to be sold to the newts. Give a newt an oyster and he gets a meal; give him a knife to shuck oysters and he gets a weapon of global domination.

Čapek is endlessly witty and his translator is a master at capturing that wit in English. Describing the tribal chief of an isolated village in Indonesia: “He was an elderly gentleman and naked, but far thinner than mayors are in Europe.” And the tenacious clinging of oysters to their rocky beds as “Shells that stick fast to the stones like the Jewish faith.” And he knows his differentials when it comes to Catholic piety: “‘Then I shall have a Catholic mass said too,’ decided Jens Jensen. ‘For Captain van Toch. But I shall have it said here in Marseilles. I think that in that big church they’ll do it cheaper, cost price.’ ‘It could be; but an Irish mass is the real thing. In my home, man, the Jesuits are devils; they can nearly do wonders. Just like witch doctors or heathens.’” And Čapek is not averse to the odd important sociological observation such as “Fossil reptiles prefer blondes!”

In his introduction, Robert Adams says Čapek writes like G.K. Chesterton. He’s wrong. Čapek is much more entertaining. His wry commentary on sex, business, and the ironies of human ambition could never emanate from Chesterton. And the cosmopolitain Čapek makes Chesterton look like a provincial hack. His attack on European colonialism is as relevant as it ever was in our era of continuing global exploitation of the poor by the rich, not least because of his insight that it leads to massive population movements that are universally destructive.

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