In this essay the three books of the Tripods trilogy, written in quick succession in 1968-9, are read as a continuous, if episodic, novel. It's true that The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire tell independent stories and that they have quite different moods. But each continues directly from the last, and makes many backward references to it; most of the characters appear in at least two of the books. The books have similar lengths (10 or 11 chapters, 150 pages each) and might be called quest novels, each named, somewhat poetically, after what is being sought for. Each features one long journey and one long stay. Each is spread out over a considerable time, with many brief scenes: a year each for the first two books, four years for the third. At about the three-quarters point in the narrative, Will destroys something more of the Tripods in each book: first a Tripod, then a Master and at last a City. Contests appear in all three: the Tournament, the Games, the Hunt. Each novel hinges at a point where the narrator Will, usually for inglorious reasons, discovers something and what turns out to be decisive action quickly follows. For all these reasons, the books are treated as a single work below. But it might also be said that a quite different reading could be made of The White Mountains alone, a rounded work in which science fiction (and therefore suspension of disbelief) is kept to a bare minimum, and in which the Tripods themselves remain enigmatic, a cypher for technology itself.

Quotations are from the mid-1980s UK edition, which Christopher regards as the best. (American editions differ in spellings and a few points of vocabulary, and do not incorporate minor improvements in descriptive passages of, particularly, The Pool of Fire.)

All three books are narrated and by the same character, Will Parker, the son of an English miller who runs away from home. Like many children's books for this age-group, the trilogy is a coming-of-age story couched as the tale of a rebellion. More specifically, since there are many ways to grow up, it is about finding a purpose in life.

The White Mountains is, in some ways, about the relationship of children to adults, opening with a divide between the two in the apparently eighteenth-century village of Wherton. The nearest to dissidents in this community are the Vagrants, those whose rite of passage into adulthood (the Capping, a sort of surgical mind-control process) has gone horribly wrong. ("The great majority of Cappings were entirely successful. I suppose only about one in twenty produced a Vagrant.") Will observes one, of his father's age, who does nothing but pile up stones:

...the others moved on, the young one in the morning and the cairn-builder in the afternoon of the same day. The pile of stones stayed there, unfinished and without meaning. I looked at them that evening, and wondered what I would be doing twenty-five years from now. Grinding corn at the mill? Perhaps. Or perhaps wandering the countryside, living on charity and doing useless things. Somehow, the alternatives were not so black and white as I would have expected.

Later, Will is re-adopted by a rich surrogate family at the Chateau:

All adults [in Wherton], even my parents, had been strangers. I had respected them, admired or feared them, even loved them, but I had not known them as I was coming to know those at the castle. And the better I knew them, the harder it was to make a sweeping condemnation.

The Comtesse at the castle, who takes him in, reads oddly like his mother; if so, they get along much better. Older now, Will chooses to settle down into adult norms, though circumstances prevent this. In any case, The White Mountains ends with Will settling into what is, indeed, a kind of adult routine: the "hard life at the journey's end", with "nothing in the way of luxury", but with a purpose: as one of the free men, he will fight to overturn the unnatural social order of the world.

The Pool of Fire returns to this theme. By now, years later, Will has been useful to the free men and has served his part; but, as he is well aware, he has in some ways witnessed more than he has achieved. He acts in the shadow of the much more capable Fritz, and his recklessness makes him less than reliable. But like Napoleon, the leader of the free men, Julius, likes his troops to be lucky:

"...I am going to be irrational, and send you. And it is also true that you know the City, and will be valuable for that reason. But I think, to be honest, it is your luck that makes the biggest impression on me. You are a kind of mascot to us, Will."

Julius has given purpose not just to Will, but to the whole community of free men in the Alps:

He was close on sixty years old, a small man and a cripple. When he was a boy he had fallen into an ice crevasse and broken his thigh: it had been set badly and he walked with a limp. In those days, things had been very different... Those who had lived there had no purpose but survival, and their numbers were dwindling.

Ruling notionally through a Council, Julius decides all that happens in the White Mountains, an irony which is not lost on the free men. As early as Will's first assignment, in The City of Gold and Lead, Julius has reservations:

"The doubt we had was about you yourself. You are impatient, thoughtless, likely to rush into things... Can we rely on you to do your utmost to guard against your own recklessness?"

The answer will turn out to be no, and Julius will grow to distrust Will even further. When Will, Fritz and Henry are all sent on raids, Will is the only one not placed in command.

Meanwhile, the war is ending: what will he do when it is over? Beanpole has a reputation among the scientists, and is widely respected. When Will is given an unpleasant assignment, "...it would be possible for you to be transferred to other duties," Beanpole offers, tactfully leaving his higher rank unstated. Meanwhile, Henry is becoming a kind of politician, visibly growing leaner and taller, more confident and with a growing sense of mission for himself. Will is conscious of having found nothing to compare with this. "There are plenty of things I could do. Swim, lie in the sun, catch flies..." In the event, when the war finally ends, this is pretty much what he does do:

In a ship, with half a dozen others, I crossed the seas, and put into strange forgotten harbours on unknown coasts. Under sail because, although there were ships with engines now, we preferred it that way.

It is for this reason that the final page of The Pool of Fire, in which Will is summoned back to responsibility, is so appropriate. The plot has been artfully constructed so that the wrong hero has sacrificed himself; it should have been Will, the most easily spared. The trilogy ends, as it began, with Will's recruitment to a purposeful life.

It might be said that while the first and last books meditate on the nature of freedom, The City of Gold and Lead is about captivity. The free men are beseiged in their mountain fastness, the Masters are beseiged in their City. Neither could breathe the air or move freely in the other's domain. The second half of the book is, in a sense, a prison drama, and a highly claustrophobic one. In chapters 7 to 10, there are only three speaking characters. There seems no escape, nor even any liberty to protest.

But there are more subtle forms of captivity. Capping itself is one. Will leaves home in The White Mountains because "I could not stay, any more than a sheep could walk through a slaughter-house door, once it knew what lay beyond." In a sense it is settling down into adult life which is the prison -- the end, at least, of all our exploring. Even later, at the Chateau, "Whatever privileges I was given, I would still be a sheep among sheep."

And then there are darker moments, loaded with sexual symbolism. John Griffiths, in Three Tomorrows: American, British and Soviet Science Fiction (1980), notes of Christopher's adult novels that:

Christopher has a great knack of using sexual indignity, particularly rape in the presence of the male lover or husband, to bring home the horror of the situations he creates. The stripping of all the illusions is the sort of uncompromising reality which shows how clearly Christopher has grasped the fundamentals of survival.

What is captivity, if not helplessness? Sexuality is loaded into a pair of linked scenes in the first two books. In The White Mountains, Will pulls the turban from Eloise's head only to find that he has broken a taboo. It is forbidden for any man to see her bare head. Later, in a pivotal moment in The City of Gold and Lead, Will discovers Eloise dead and placed in a display casket. Significantly, the earlier scene is remembered. In the Pyramid of Beauty, the girls -- killed to preserve their beauty, and compared to a butterfly collection -- are sorted by hair colour.

...It was not red hair my eyes sought, but black -- dark hair which I had seen once only, through the silvery mesh of the Cap, when I had playfully snatched the turban from her in the little garden between the castle and the river. [...] her head was bare of both crown and turban. Her hair had grown in the weeks that followed that time in the garden. I looked at her close-cropped curls.

In the City, Eloise's bare head is on open display. In its way, this is indeed "rape in the presence of the male lover or husband". It is certainly a turning point in the book: the end of half-illusions that the City is not so bad, that the inhabitants are not so malign.

Throughout the years in The Pool of Fire, when it seems to Will that Henry and Beanpole are making more of themselves, Will is unable to see that they also admire him. Where Will is lucky, Henry is not: "...his one important enterprise a failure, though through no fault of his own". Equally, it had been Beanpole's imagination years before which had led him to suffer a collapse of courage, when he and Will were contending to enter the enemy City in the guise of athletes. In the crucial round of the long jump contest at the Games:

He looked at me with a blank expression. "I stepped on the board. I haven't done that since the earliest days of training."

(Julius excludes him from every subsequent mission, even the ballooning raid which was his own idea.) Beanpole is also bored of laboratory life, and hangs on every word of tales from the world outside; which Will, in moments of very dry comedy, mistakes as Beanpole's kindness in listening to the dull exploits of his friends.

Is Will an anti-hero? Many of John Christopher's protagonists are, or can be read as such: the narrator of the Sword of the Spirits trilogy, written soon after, becomes a monster. Will never does anything comparably bad. His continual acts of recklessness could not be called wicked. He seems worse because, in the narration, he is invariably hard on himself, never making much of what is palpably true: that almost everybody likes him, not least his often-reproving superiors, Fritz and Julius.

His moments of triumph are told in such a way as to seem only a lucky outcome stemming from weaknesses. Probably his most conventionally heroic act is to destroy a Tripod with an iron egg (that is, a hand grenade) in Chapter 9 of The White Mountains. But this was Beanpole's idea, and in any case, didn't work. The eggs proved ineffective against the legs of the Tripod. Will succeeds only because he has recently been wounded:

I had taken [the egg] in my left hand, and I needed to transfer it to the right. As I did so, pain ripped my arm-pit again, and I dropped it. I was fumbling on the ground to pick it up...

The delay gives the Tripod time to lift Will "steeple-high, higher", and he remembers that he is still holding the last egg, and throws it:

I thought at first that I had missed, but the egg hit the edge of the opening and ricocheted inside.

Similarly, it is Will who discovers the most important secret of the City, through being befriended by his Master. This can only occur because he gives away his unusual, free-thinking nature, the single thing it is most essential that he conceals. His Master, while still thinking of him as essentially a badly-trained animal, beats him, but is surprised by Will's response. "You are a strange one, boy." Not everybody would blame themselves quite so much as Will does:

What he said petrified me. I had not realized, though I suppose I should have done, that the natural reaction of the Capped to being beaten would be to howl like children. Fritz had sensed this and behaved accordingly, but I had stupidly resisted through pride.

The hero who doesn't see himself as a hero is a staple of children's fiction. Boys in 1940s and 1950s fantasies -- in American old-time radio shows like Space Patrol or in English adventure books like the Biggles aviation stories -- often paint themselves as just regular boys next door, muddling through with an honest heart. Here Matt, the boy from Iowa who becomes the eponymous Space Cadet (Robert Heinlein, 1948), tries on his oyster-white uniform and finds a rule book in the pocket:

He had read it before taps, until his mind was a jumble of undigested rules: "A cadet is an officer in a limited sense--" "--behave with decorum and sobriety appropriate to the occasion--" "--in accordance with local custom rather than Patrol custom unless in conflict with an invariant law of the Federation or regulation of the Patrol." "--but the responsibility of determining the legality of the order rests on the person ordered as well as on the person giving the order." "--circumstances not covered by law or regulation must be decided by the individual in the light of the living tradition of the Patrol." "Cadets will at all times be smooth-shaven and will not wear their hair longer than two inches."

He felt that he understood the last mentioned.

But Matt never does anything he is really ashamed of, and never needs to. In contrast the free men of the Tripods trilogy have no Federation, are outlaws and can only exist by stealing from the unwittingly enslaved: stealing their food and goods, but also stealing away their children. "This was a thing that I could never properly resolve in my mind. To Fritz, it was simple and obvious: we had our duty, and must do it. We were helping to save these people..." This is not a satisfactory answer and Will knows it. Another contrast between Will and the generic boy-who-takes-on-adventures is that, after Will reproaches himself, Julius confirms Will's opinion of himself by reproaching him further.

If Will is melancholic, this is nothing by comparison to Fritz. Where Will sulks, Fritz is stoical. Nowhere is stoicism more needed than in the City, a place of suffering and death. By the caprice of evil, Fritz is far more harshly treated:

His ribs showed painfully through the flesh of his chest, and his face was gaunt. He had the stooped posture that one saw in those who had been a year or more in the City. I saw something else, too, with horror: a pattern of angry marks across his back.

"In every way possible, his Master humiliated and persecuted and heaped impossible burdens upon him." Flogged half to death (like a character from an old-fashioned sea adventure story), Fritz sinks steadily further into collapse. Later, when it appears that Will's carelessness has cost Fritz's life, Will sinks into guilt. Julius reproves him again. He resolves to do better. Julius replies:

"I am not sure that such a promise will serve. It would be different if you were of Fritz's temper. Yes, I will speak of him, even though it hurts you. Fritz was melancholic by nature, and could tolerate his own gloom. I do not think this is so with you, who are sanguine and impatient. In your case, remorse and despondency could be crippling."

And if Fritz is melancholic, this is nothing by comparison to the Masters, who live strangely solitary lives, and whose bodies express their melancholy directly. Accidie makes them physically ill, with a disease sinking them into gloom. Fatalism kills them entirely.

"Why did they give in so easily? I have never understood." The fatalism of the Masters is a note of realism, answering a very reasonable question. If the Masters had made an all-out fight of it, the free men could not possibly have won. The trilogy is a work of fantasy whose hypothesis is hard enough to take as it is: strange machines preside over an enforcedly medieval world. Subject to this massive element of unreality, the plot strives for realism.

There are many juvenile books in which it falls to fourteen year-old boys to save the world. In hardly any is it explained why an adult isn't sent instead. The Tripods books are an exception. The free men recruit adolescents because anyone older is Capped and therefore irretrievably lost. Julius sends (slightly older) boys into the City as agents because the City only admits the young and strong -- conditions are so brutal that anyone weaker would die almost at once. Nevertheless, "Our leaders keep their counsel, and we are only newcomers and boys -- we could not expect to know what the projects are, or what our part in them may be." At every point where Julius has a choice in the matter, grown-ups are in charge, relegating the boys to guard duty. They neither participate in, nor even witness, the Council of the free men. Another example of Julius's failure to conform to children's-book conventions comes when he has to select three agents in chapter 1 of the second book. There were, of course, three heroes in the first book. But Julius doesn't keep them together: why should he?

The acrimonious collapse of the post-war Conference rings true in a story which has been populated by ambiguously good heroes and sympathetic villains. The only two Masters who appear directly in the narrative are personable, and Will comes to like both of them. The free men are disunited. In their off moments, Will is rash, Henry is cruel, Beanpole is afraid, Fritz is ruthless and Julius is arrogant, and it is their undoing.

In other ways, too, the protagonists live in what might be called the real world. This is not a Tolkienesque trilogy with a sketch of misty-mountained lands in the flyleaf. As had been his habit when writing adult novels, Christopher made use of large-scale maps to get distances and positions exactly right, and the result is at every point consistent with the real Europe. It is not easy to live off the land, so that hunger is a persistent theme:

In the afternoon we found a clump of horse-radish, and pulled the roots up and ate them. The taste was bitter and fiery, but it was food.

Sleet, rain and cloud are commoner than sunshine. Seasons pass, and the story is not (like an Enid Blyton story) set in an endless summer. Illness is frequent; Fritz nearly dies of tuberculosis, while Will spends almost as much of The White Mountains incapacitated as able-bodied.

If the landscape of this rural Europe never has a glowing, idealised Poussin feel to it, with happy peasants gathering in corn beneath great stone palaces, it is nevertheless a richly romantic fantasy. The Alps have always been a central motif in romanticism, from painting to the gothic novel. Freedom lies among the wild ice, overlooking the pastoral vistas below. (John Christopher is not the first to have been overwhelmed by visiting the Bernese Oberland and writing it into his fantasy: the same mountain became Mount Caradhras in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.) Almost as important as the mountains are the rivers. A story which begins at a water-mill eventually takes in most of the great rivers of Western Europe: the Seine, the Saône, the Rhine, the Danube. (The rafting sequence in Chapter 3 of The City of Gold and Lead is sometimes compared by critics to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.) And there is something sumptuous about the wreck of Paris: a bridge over the Seine "marked only by half a dozen piles of rubble with the water boiling round them", the roof of the nave of Notre Dame fallen in, the "white gleam of bone" on the skeletons in the streets which are now forest.

There is Romantic poetry, too: Shelley and Coleridge are both quoted at modest length, and Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias is part of the fabric of The White Mountains. It was written in 1817, after the poet had seen the massive figure of Ramases II which had recently been brought from Egypt to the British Museum. ("Ozymandias" is a garbled transliteration of "Ramases".)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley published this poem, in the London Examiner, immediately before leaving England to travel, partly on foot, to the Swiss Alps. The presence of this poem in The White Mountains is palpable -- it is quoted by the Vagrant, who does indeed turn out to be a traveller from an antique land, since he is in a sense from the world before the coming of the Tripods. The rusting great ship of the Ancients, the stagnant and ruined great cities are indeed a colossal wreck, ignored by the world. (The Vagrant who calls himself Ozymandias shams madness by reciting other odd fragments of poetry, too -- Matthew 8:20; "His name shall be Star" from a poem by W. H. Auden; a Baudelaire sonnet. There is a reference to Goethe in The City of Gold and Lead.)

No cars, no pollution, no processed food, no television. Those industrial artifacts which do survive take on a burnish of wonder, either because they remain as monuments to the ancients, like the surviving railway tracks, or because of their magical danger, like the "iron goose eggs". John Christopher writes:

The feedback I've had from [...] children over more than three decades shows that what they most like about the books is the unnerving feeling of being in a historical set-up, incidentally lit by monstrous flashes from some mysterious future.

The characters call the hand grenades "iron eggs", discovering them but lacking our words for them: the same could be said about the numerous landmarks visited, which are often emblematic of what we now know as nations. That these landmarks are invariably real is not always immediately obvious, since place-names are omitted in favour of description. The narrator speaks in a world where nobody travels beyond his village of birth, where there are no maps: he addresses a reader who is not assumed to know how Europe, or the wider world, is laid out. What seems to be vagueness is a stylistic device. A good example comes in Chapter 8 of The Pool of Fire:

It ran south of west, almost straight, absolutely regular, a ditch that the ancients had made to take their ships across the isthmus from one ocean to the other.

The isthmus divides the Americas, so this can only refer to the Panama Canal. An indirect manner of speaking, in a mapless world, persists until the final, post-war chapter of The Pool of Fire, in which casual place-names are fired off as a stylistic indication of how much the world has changed since the end of the war:

From the Conference building you could walk out, over hard-packed snow, up the slope to the Jungfraujoch itself. The Jungfrau glistened on our left, the Mönch and Eiger on our right. There was the rounded dome of the Observatory...

The fantasy is ended, as in so many other ways. The unity of the free men is shattered: their polyglot names had been a romantic vision in itself -- Henry, Carlos, Ulf, Jan, Mario, André, Julius and, of course, Fritz. (In a 1968 English book for boys, to have any admirable German character was rare enough, but for him to be more heroic than the hero is almost unique.) During and before the struggle with the Tripods it had been a Europe of cultures and not of boundaries. No longer: "I looked at Julius. His head was bowed, his hands covering his eyes." The Pool of Fire is elegiac by the end. Civilisation has been dreaming, but now the sleeper has awoken:

I... had heard my father talk about installing electrical plant at the mill. In Winchester, new buildings had started to soar within a stone's throw of the cathedral... It was what most people wanted, but I did not. I thought of the world into which I had been born, and in which I had grown up -- the world of villages and small towns, of a peaceful ordered life, untroubled, unhurried, taking its pattern from the seasons.