Wells at fullest
In this engaging half-biography, Claire Tomalin shows us that The Time Machine author is still relevant.
The Young HG Wells by Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalin has written a halfbiography of HG Wells, taking him to the age of 49. There is good reason for this: almost all his best work was written before 1914. He lived and continued to write prolifically till he died in 1946, but of his later books only his interesting and eccentric Outline of History and Experiment in Autobiography are worth reading. But his early work, the science fiction stories and novellas and his comic novels, especially The History of Mr Polly and TonoBungay, retain their vitality. In this engaging study, Tomalin tells us that his early success The Time Machine has never been out of print. No wonder. It gripped me when I was 11; it remains fascinating and alarming.
A mid-Victorian, born the same year as Kipling, Wells had had no social advantages, but, educated as a scientist, he had in youth and middle age an invincible optimism. Orwell, an admirer from schooldays, summarised Wells’s message: “Science can solve all the ills that humanity is heir to, but man is at present too blind to see the possibility of his own powers”. This is still true, although we are now perhaps more aware of the horrors of what Churchill, surprisingly perhaps
Land of the Ilich: Journeys into Islay’s Past by Steven Mithen
Based at the University of Reading, Professor Steven Mithen is an archaeologist with a special interest in the evolution of the human mind and of human culture – as revealed through the material record unearthed from bogs, dunes, deserts, forests and grasslands across the planet – that has made his an admirer and friend of Wells, called “perverted science”. Orwell in the 1940s thought Wells “too sane to understand the modern world”.
The young Wells, fizzing with ideas and optimism, is very attractive. He was extraordinarily energetic, despite suffering wretched health in his twenties, coming near to death a couple of times. He loved the outdoor life and was an early cyclist, walker and hillclimber. But he worked remarkably hard. Tomalin says that when pressed he could write 7,000 words in a day, all in longhand; a daunting thought.
He had many friendships with other writers, though he had no time for the “art novel” – a cause of his falling-out with Joseph Conrad and, painfully, Henry James. Except for comic novels of lower-middle-class life and his extraordinary science fiction, he wrote to educate, influence and form public opinion. He was a materialist, an atheist, a socialist and a republican, an active and turbulent member of the Fabian Society, working, and sometimes sparring, with Shaw and the Webbs. The only weak, or tiresome, chapter in Tomalin’s delightful book deals with the internal politics of the Fabians.
Wells married twice and had several mistresses, at least two illegitimate children – one, Anthony, the child of his long affair with Rebecca West. His
books influential far beyond academic circles.
Now he turns the full searchlight of his attention and experience onto one small Scottish island, and its people, the Ilich. The island is Islay, the southernmost of all the Hebrides.
Mithen has been fascinated by Islay for 30 years, seeing the island as a vital crossroads of early human life on these islands, set across the main sea route from Ireland to Scotland, and from the west coast of France and Spain north towards Orkney, and then east to Norway. In this
comprehensive study, he takes us on a series of journeys across the island – almost always by bicycle and on foot – each of which reveals the story of a new period in its human history, from earliest Mesolithic times, through the Bronze Age, the Vikings and the mediaeval Lordship of the Isles, to the economic and industrial developments of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the remaining traces of the Second World War.
His writing is detailed, but also fluent; and what Mithen has produced is not only a mighty guide to the archaeological landscape of Islay, but a thrilling microcosm of human history, captured through the story of one small island.
And if love for Islay’s land and people vibrates through every page of this remarkable book, then behind it there also lies something deeper; a profound concern for humanity as a whole, and a kind