A journey doesn't have to be particularly long to change your view of the world. It doesn't even have to take you far from home. In fact, I would argue that one of the most powerful descriptions of a journey in literature works precisely because its narrator stays close to home. Its power comes in showing those familiar places in a new light. Showing them, in fact, in a green-tinged light. And then blowing them to pieces.

Yes, I'm talking about the path of destruction wreaked by the Martians in HG Wells's War of the Worlds. More specifically, I'm thinking of the journey the novel's narrator takes as he battles to survive the invasion. In all, he probably doesn't travel more than 50 miles, and he certainly doesn't leave the beaten path – but that isn't to detract from the profundity of his experience or the epic nature of his struggle. Indeed, it's precisely because he remains in what even now I'm tempted to describe as the "safety" of the Home Counties that The War of the Worlds is so effective. Both because it's disconcerting to see poisonous gas and heat rays laying waste to that comfortable world – and because, it's fun. Who wouldn't want to have a blast at Weybridge, after all?

Certainly HG Wells later claimed to have relished the prospect. In an introduction to a 1920s Atlantic edition of the novel he explained how much he enjoyed cycling around the settings for the novel, diligently noting the outstanding architectural features in each place – and jotting down ideas for how he would wipe them from the map. It's possible even to read the book as an enjoyably mischievous rampage through middle England. Landing the Martians in Woking is certainly a good way to shake commuters out of their bourgeois complacency.

Yet that isn't really how the story comes across, even if Wells may have had a sense of humour, and plenty of interesting thoughts about the morality of late Victorian capitalists. Invasion, he shows carefully and compassionately, is no fun at all. This journey is a nightmare.

Apparently, HG Wells disliked the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds because it spread the Martian attack out over too much of the USA. He keeps things deliberately small in scale, for practical tactical reasons (the Martians are able to keep in contact with each other and move on London in formation) and because reporting these intergalactic events on a human scale makes them more vivid and more easy to imagine. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to Leatherhead, and a brief visit to Ottershaw Observatory (in whose eminently civilised confines we first meet the narrator, watching the skies and some interesting eruptions on the planet Mars), he travels no further than Kensington – a pleasant day's cycling from Woking. Or a pleasant day's cycling if the Home Counties hadn't just been ravaged by tripod fighting machines and poison gas.

There's still a certain cosiness to the places the narrator visits, which Wells exploits to the full. How strange to read "Byfleet was in a tumult". How odd to think of the waters of the Thames boiling and steaming around the ferry at Shepperton. How unsettling to witness mankind on its knees at Walton-on-Thames, and a soot-smudged curate ranting: "Fire, earthquake death. As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work –"

The narrator travels by slowly, by pony and trap, by rowing boat, by bike and by foot, sheltering in ordinary suburban houses, eating tins of peaches, drinking beer from bottles. Much of what he encounters is small scale, local, everyday. Naturally, that makes the contrast with the ravaged wastelands left by the Martians all the stronger. Even now, more than 100 years after publication it's easy to picture the scene and share the narrator's horror at losing his home. It's eerie too, to think of the silent London he eventually reaches. Then to feel his dazed horror on his return to Woking and to a life returning to an even keel, but for the odd encounter, like seeing a pony he left for dead on the way out, the body now picked down to the bones.

In those few miles of travelling the narrator has witnessed the end of human civilisation. Or, at least, civilisation as he knew it. He has journeyed from a world with regular trains, newspaper deliveries, friendly astronomers in convenient observatories, dinner parties and policemen, to starvation, chaos and corpses on the road. He has seen what it is to be invaded. Plenty of Wells's contemporaries no doubt transposed the Martians for Germans. Some might also have thought about what it means to be part of the world's biggest empire. (War of the Worlds was published in 1898. A year later, Conrad published Heart of Darkness containing the famous line: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.") Today, such concerns are further from us. Plenty of the Victorian setting also seems quaint. But there are still enough shocks of the familiar, and moments of alarming strangeness to ensure The War of the Worlds remains essential. It's hard to beat as a journey into the end of everything you take for granted.