Some Science-Fiction, by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells; we all know him, right? Late Victorian British writer of Science Fiction? Wrote The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds? Good, now we’re on the same page. Considering how these three books of his aren’t especially long, I’ve tackled them all for your continuing benefit; and so, without further preamble, let’s see if this guy is any good.

The Time Machine (1895)

          Time travel is one of those staple science fiction concepts. ‘What if we could travel through time?’ they excitedly ask, and sure enough the first of H.G. Wells’ pieces on our list is about just that. The story is written from the point of view of some guy, part of a small scientific fraternity who seemingly have, amongst their number, an inventor of a time machine. When this Time Traveller (he’s not named in the story), shows up looking a little worse for wear, he recounts his tale of his first trip through time, to the far reaches of the future.

          First thing to note, this Time Traveller is not a very good scientist. Carefully controlled experiments and peer review? Nonsense; I’ll just sit in my new toy and whizz off without telling a soul, and go as far into the future as I can manage. The year 802,701 AD, to be precise – and yes, that number indicates that he travels nearly eight hundred thousand years into the future, a period of time which dwarfs the current age of human civilisation. He arrives in a world populated by rather pathetic, benign descendents of the human race, who seem to live in a sort of care-free daze while they bumble around like hippies. Seems like a rather nice future, to be honest; but that’s before he discovers that these aren’t the only descendents of humanity. It turns out that there’s another new group, living underground in total darkness, the carnivorous Morlocks who only venture to the surface at night, when the moon is sufficiently New to cloud the world in pitch-darkness. The Time Traveller quickly realises that the Morlocks have stolen his machine, for some reason, and with nothing more than a box of matches and the clothes he’s standing in, he’s got to find a way to get it back if he’s ever to see his own time again. This could all have been avoided if he’d had some kind of back-up plan, or a team of helpers to look after his machine while he made reconnaissance.

          So yes, it’s a rather short, faintly dull little novel, but it has one or two interesting ideas at its core. The writing style is formal Victorian, but not too heavy, and it feels almost like a lightweight H.P. Lovecraft, at least once the Morlocks get involved. There are one or two moments of tension to break the banality, and the last few chapters have some nice touches (giant crabs and other weird stuff) to try and eke out a bit more from the concept, before it anticlimaxes. It’s a nice little read if you’re into that sort of thing.

The Invisible Man (1897)

            A man succeeds in turning himself invisible. It’s a shame that he didn’t bother to find a way to turn himself visible again before he committed to it. It’s also a shame he actually turned out to be a deranged sociopath. It’s actually quite a good story, would you believe it?

          So in this proto-superhero classic, a mysterious man arrives at an inn completely swaddled in clothing, fully scarfed, hatted and muffled so that the landlady and locals have no idea of what he looks like, before establishing himself in a room and demanding near-total isolation. Who could this man be, and why won’t he show one tiny scrap of flesh beyond his blatantly fake-looking nose? Well unfortunately, any suspense or mystery in the early part of the book is ruined by the title giving everything away! The reason this man goes everywhere dressed from head to foot is so that he doesn’t reveal that he’s completely invisible. If he did not disguise his features, he’d just look like a suit of clothes wandering around of their own accord, and hence the pitchfork-wielding mobs would probably want to kill him. And quite right too, considering he’s not actually a very nice man at all.

          The story takes place all in the third-person, from the point of view of the ordinary locals who watch in suspicion as this mysterious stranger moves throughout their midst, wondering what his secret project might be. By the time of the big reveal, when the Invisible Man shows himself (a pun that has no doubt been used for the past 117 years), the story has actually turned out to be quite good; the premise is unusual and it succeeds in drawing you in, meaning that it’s worth getting to the end just to see what happens. The various characters are well-made and serve their functions to the story, while the Invisible Man himself is actually a decent character in his own right. Rude, suspicious, and genuinely quite nasty – he got himself into this mess, but by no means does he warrant sympathy. This superpower he’s given himself has more downsides than advantages, and only works if he’s totally naked (an odd superpower and not one suited to a British climate). By the time of climax the odds are very much against him, then it’s just the tricky matter of finally nailing him for good.

          All in all, a disposable but entertaining read. Certainly my favourite of the three H.G. Wells stories reviewed here today.

The War of the Worlds (1898)

          One of the very first pieces of ‘alien invasion’ literature ever written, it’s basically a Victorian Independence Day. The planet Mars harbours a thoroughly inhuman species who covet the Earth for themselves, and in the 19^th century the best way for them to invade is to load themselves up in rockets and literally fire themselves at our world. The story is told from the perspective of a middle-class guy whose hometown of Woking is the first crash-site for this interplanetary invasion, and he coldly recounts the moments of first contact, the emergence of the near-unstoppable Martian war machines – the tripods – and their assault right through the heart of middle England and into London.

          This story is fascinating as a cultural relic, a view of how the human race may have coped in a war against a technologically superior foe during the pre-First World War era. Whereas the Martians have gigantic armoured all-terrain war machines armed with incredibly destructive ‘heat-ray’ weapons, and a gaseous superweapon, all the humans have to combat them at this stage are artillery, dynamite, and 19^th century battleships. Any attempt at resistance to the Martian onslaught is negligible, and within a very short space of time London, at that time the capital of one of the most powerful nations in the world, is completely overrun. The occasional dual-narrative account from the protagonist’s brother (neither character is named, annoyingly) allows the narrator to recount the effects of the evacuation of London, and the horror of the crowds of fleeing people trying to find safety elsewhere in the country, or else escape overseas completely. In many ways this piece of science fiction is effective as a ‘what if?’ story, asking the question of what would happen should secure, powerful Great Britain be suddenly brought low. The same as anywhere else; society would collapse, and the citizens of one of the wealthiest nations in the world would become refugees.

          Of the writing itself, I have less good things to say. The characters are not much more than cardboard cut-outs; the protagonist, his wife, his brother, an artilleryman and a curate making up a rather dull, unnamed cast whose only function is to add some token humanity to a story about the collapse of civilisation. The prose felt quite basic and unengaging, and the story itself was not particularly interesting despite the whole ‘Victorians Vs. Martians’ aspect. It was short, though, and not dense in any way, but that also means that there’s no real flourish of writing, nothing to really hook you in like characters, or story, just a hard grey account. It’s fascinating as a cultural artefact, and if you’re interested in the history of sci-fi or ever wondered what would have happened if Independence Day had taken place in Woking in the 1890s, then you might find a little gem here, but aside from those reasons there’s little point in digging this book off the shelf.

The Bibliosible Man

Wells, H.G. Five Great Novels. An Omnibus. Gollancz: St. Ives. (2004 [All stories published 1895-1901])

Captain Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a piece of historical fiction from the timeless 1990s, a book named after one of the major symbolic props featured in the story. Please note that the mandolin in question is not a mcguffin; it is not essential to the plot, but it nevertheless plays a major role during relatively long sections of the book that make me ashamed that I know so little about music.

          I’ll say, right off the bat, that I did begin to warm to Captain Corelli’s Mandolin the more I got into it. Louis de Bernieres has some degree of writing skill, and he chose an interesting setting and subject from which the story grows in a fairly natural manner. It takes place in a community on the western Greek island of Cephallonia during the Second World War; one of the less talked-about theatres of that horrific conflict. Dr. Iannis is an unqualified but nevertheless highly skilled medical practitioner, and occupies a position in his island community which is vaguely shamanic; and living alone with his teenage daughter, Pelagia, his life is divided between helping out the villagers’ odd medical complaints, and writing a history of his home island before their pet goat can finish eating it. There are a few other moderately colourful characters in the community; a communist, a monarchist, a priest, a strongman, a hunky young fisherman, and a mildly irritating small child, but this idyllic life is subsequently torn asunder by the dramatic events which rocked mid-twentieth century Greece – disasters both man-made and natural.

          The focus of the story jumps around a bit. In between the island scenes we see what’s happening elsewhere in the world – chapter 2 is an eclectic monologue from Benito Mussolini (the Italian dictator, as if you didn’t know already), which presents him as a terribly stupid, vain, delusional, cat-hating psychopath simply by putting words in his mouth as he plans an invasion of Greece on the spur of the moment. On occasion we get a first-person narrative from a homosexual Italian soldier called Carlo, through whom we see first-hand the pointless stupidity of the invasion of Greece, the endless cock-ups of the Italian commanders, and the brutal conditions the two forces face as a result. We also get the odd chapter devoted to a few of Cephallonia’s other characters, such as the gluttonous priest or the hermit goat-herd, or else we witness the events of the wider world from noteworthy people, such as the Italian ambassador in Greece as he delivers the declaration of war, or the Greek Fascist Prime Minister (Dictator) Metaxas as he considers his lot in life on the eve of the invasion. The book changes its writing style and perspective many times during its course, sometimes a third person description of the story and major protagonists, sometimes letters or diaries written in the first person of Carlo or Pelagia, and on one occasion at least we’re served a dramatic, theatrical dialogue between Pelagia and Mandras, which has been ‘camped up’ purely for effect. While it is interesting to have so many perspectives on so many interrelated issues, this unfortunately has the price of making chapter-transition quite jarring in places.

          Eventually, with a little help from the Nazi Germans, the Axis forces end up occupying Greece – and this means Cephallonia as well. This is when we meet Captain Antonio Corelli, the mandolin-playing and thoroughly decent Italian officer billeted in Dr Iannis’ house. Naturally he and Pelagia ‘fall in love’ (oh how romantic!) but after a long time of a relatively uneventful military occupation, the main issue being famine, peace on the island is shattered when the war flares up again. Italy itself is invaded by the allies, toppling Mussolini’s regime, and with Italian forces surrendering to the Allies in droves, the joint Italian-German occupation of Cephallonia suddenly brings the war right onto the island itself.

          Much of the book is gruesome. War generally is, but de Bernieres recounts in horrific detail the sort of things that tend to go on; the atrocities, the unbearable conditions of combat, the stomach-churningly graphic injuries, and the psychological scarring of the people involved. There are many unpleasant moments in this book, many disturbing sequences, and those are the times that stick in your mind. But alongside this gruesomeness are many more moments of poignancy; moments that can be genuinely moving to the reader (even a shrivel-hearted old cynic like me), to the extent that as the years of the story go by, all this endless yanking on our heartstrings can actually get a little wearisome. Seriously, it gets to the point of inducing vomit, with all this sentimentality.

          But yes, I did undoubtedly enjoy the book, and not least because as someone who is displaying mild symptoms of philhellenism, it held a natural interest. Part of this was due to the occasional inclusion of the odd Greek word or phrase (transcribed into the Latin alphabet, sadly), and a fairly hands-on approach to twentieth-century Greek history, but there was also a rather sweet character arc involving a tame pine marten called Psipsina – a word which means pussy cat, which not only looks amazing when written in Greek characters, but is also generally a lovely word to say.  

           It is upsetting to see the way that Cephallonia is swept around as a result of the titanic conflict between larger powers, and in some ways it is good to see this historical topic presented from the point of view of ordinary human beings, not historians or strategists or journalists or politicians. Not being an expert on modern Greek history, I can’t actually attest to historical accuracy of de Bernieres' novel, and being a relatively skilled writer he can make an emotive and compelling narrative – but the historian in me can’t help but wonder if the truth of the matter is a great deal more complex than this work of fiction sets out, and I hope that he at least made a thorough investigation into the matter before publishing - but then, expecting a writer of fiction to make a thorough examination of their chosen topic is asking too much. He particularly pours scorn on the ELAS, one of the communist military insurgent groups which one of the characters joins, and whose leader is a thoroughly unpleasant man who goes by the name of Hector, using high-minded Marxist rhetoric as an excuse to be a vicious, greedy, murdering scumbag. De Bernieres certainly picks which side he’s on when he’s writing, and as a result it can, at times, feel a bit partisan.

          While a majority of the book is set during the Second World War, the last fifth of the story negotiates the many long decades that follow the retreat of the Axis powers; first the Greek Civil War, the causes of which could be seen building in the shadows of the occupation, during which the dying embers of Dr Iannis’ and Pelagia’s old life and beliefs are blown out for the last time, then the cataclysmic earthquake in 1953 which reduces every building on the island to rubble, and the years that see the rebuilding of Greece, and Cephallonia in particular, as a tourist hotspot which would cater for the offspring of those who had once visited as invaders, right up to the decade of the book’s publication. While I did like this last section, it did feel more than a little tacked-on to the main story which has already been told; it was an overlong epilogue, to show what happens to the various characters in the aftermath of the historical events it describes, and I could not exactly see what it was all leading towards, or indeed why we had to keep reading. I’ll soften my criticism somewhat by saying that I sort of like this idea of an extended epilogue – better than a book that cuts off the moment it decides it’s over, paying no heed to the devoted reader who has begun to care for these characters and who feels cheated when the story suddenly crosses an arbitrary line. I’m thinking of Cecelia Holland’s Belt of Gold specifically here, but a lot of books are at least partially guilty of failing to satisfy the reader in this regard. Maybe Captain Corelli goes a bit to far in the opposite direction.

          So then, despite my personal reservations with the odd structural choices of the book, the way the narrative jumps around as though screaming for attention, and the times that as a reader I felt a little too distant from what was happening on the page, overall Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a decent book. Louis de Bernieres has tried to put a lot of eggs into one basket here, but besides some cursory shell-damage on a couple of these metaphorical chicken-ovulations, most of them have survived the transit. The characters can be a bit wooden at times, but overall there is this tone of sympathy for these people and the place they represent that blunts many of my criticisms. By all means pick up a copy and have a read if you're that way inclined, and if you've already read it, then well done on you.

Bibillonnia

de Berniere, Louis. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Vintage: Reading. (1998 [First Published 1994])