The Time Machine by H G Wells,1895

Continuing with my Wells-athon, all of which have been quite short novels, I now turn to the hugely influential ‘The Time Machine’.

Time travel was not a new concept, but Wells’s novel was one of the earliest on this theme, and established some concepts and principles that remain with us. having said that, I found the behaviour of Wells’ s protagonist in many ways puzzling. If you had invented a time machine, what would you do? Where would you go? Would you go back to the nativity, to the Globe in 1605, to assassinate Hitler? Or would you travel 800,000 years into the future, as Wells’ time traveller does, without packing a sandwich, let alone a camera or a weapon? I know that is a ridiculously literal response to a science fiction story, but good science fiction is above all plausible. If I could forward travel in time I would like to know how society reshapes itself in 100 years, what new technology is developed, whether extra-terrestrial life is encountered, so many other things – but 800,000 years?? Given that the existing span of human civilization can be measured in single-figure thousands of years, it seems wildly optimistic to imagine that humans will still be around this far into the future.

I appreciate I am still being too literal – time travel is simply a device to allow Wells to speculate on how human society will evolve, and we need not get too absorbed with the precise date – this is simply the vaguely distant future. In this future humans have evolved into two distinct races, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Morlocks live underground, and predate upon the simple-minded Eloi. Society is decaying terminally. Into this world the time traveller is pitched, loses his machine, and is forced to confront his slowly dawning realisation that this is no Utopia he had hoped man would have built for himself.

Wells’s conception of time travel is quaint. It doesn’t involve Government-led endeavours and vast resources – an independent inventor working in his shed is able to master the feat after a few years of study. He sets off in an extraordinarily blase fashion, making no preparation whatsover – this is a quick jaunt into the future, not an expedition risking life and limb, back in time for a quick bath and dinner at eight. Victorians were of course great explorers, and often quite eccentric into the bargain, but Wells’ s time traveller takes this to the extreme.

One of the most distinctive features of Wells’ writing is his focus on the personal, the everyday, even when his themes are global or astronomical. As I mentioned in my review of ‘War of the Worlds’, the Martian conflict is constrained within the English Home Counties, and described from the limited perspective of two individual observers. The scenes from ‘The Invisible Man’ are all rooted in suburban and rural England. Kipps and Mr Polly follow the same pattern – his protagonists are everymen. It is no coincidence that the central characters in ‘The War of the Worlds’ and ‘The Time Machine’ are both unnamed. This allows them to act as representatives of their class and time.

However, politically, ‘The Time Machine’ is a difficult book. Wells is commonly considered as a socialist, but his portrait of a future in which the working class has become a cannibalistic underground monster, preying on the weak and enfeebled middle classes, is profoundly pessimistic. It not only expresses “Wells’s horror at the realities of 19th-century class relations, but also his fears about what utopian socialism and communism were offering in their place” (Matthew Taunton). It is hard to travel back from the dystopia of 800,000 to 1895 and find a way to avoid this co-evolution and class war.

It’s been interesting to revisit Wells, but I remain ambivalent about his status as a writer. Influential, without question. I think his social comedies have aged less well than his science fiction. But if I ever am at a loss to put into words my thoughts and feelings about a novel or a writer, there is always one reliable solution, and that is to turn to George Orwell. Try it – he almost always has something sensible and interesting to say about any author of his time or before. Reliably, he puts his finger on this sense of unease. In ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, published in Horizon in 1941, he wrote:

“Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation… I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”

But he goes on to say

“the singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now…. Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells….But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world… He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. “

Orwell anatomises with extraordinary precision why Wells’s utilitarian version of socialism had not come to pass, even though the scientific advances he anticipated had been realised and indeed exceeded:

“Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to slay them…Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.”

“Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present“. Wow.

 

 

 

1984 by George Orwell, 1949

When I re-read a novel (as here) for the umpteenth time, I always look carefully for things I have forgotten or overlooked the last time. It’s surprising what you miss – I wrote about this here a while back. The first thing that struck me about ‘1984’ is what a brilliant opening it has. Not just the extraordinary first line – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – but the opening chapter. Orwell packs so much into these few pages it positively fizzes – Big Brother, the anti-sex league, the two minute hate, the Ministry of Truth, doublethink and newspeak. It’s such a detailed and comprehensive evocative of the new world we are plunged into that it is shocking.

Orwell was the first writer who spoke to me personally through his works, and I absorbed all his novels, even those he wrote simply for financial reasons, and would have been happy to have seen pulped, as well as his journalism, letters, and anything else available. So making a dispassionate judgment about 1984 is impossible, and I am not even going to try. Orwell’s fierce intellect shines from every line – this has to be the most quotable novel ever written, particularly when you think that it was not written as a series of epigrams (unlike, say ‘Dorian Gray’) but as a dystopian horror story. The concepts that Orwell develops in this novel have become part of our popular and political culture – ‘Big Brother’ for example, as a short-hand phrase to describe the over-intrusion of the state into our private lives, (as well of course as a reality TV gameshow). 1984 is a passionate warning cry against the evils of totalitarianism.

But, and there is always a but, post-war ration starved Britain had already rejected the hopelessness of ‘1984’. In electing a Labour Government with a mandate for radical change, they had decided that they didn’t have to settle for the permanent rule of the party, and that things didn’t always have to be dreary and hard. The proles had rejected the lie of the ruling class that things can never get any better. Orwell seems to have completely missed that sense of optimism. Winston Smith believes that if there is hope, it is with the proles, the working class. But the proles of 1984 are so easily distracted by pulp fiction, machine produced porn, and a fake lottery that there is never any prospect of them organising and gaining a class consciousness which would allow them to “rise from slumber, in unquenchable number”. By 1949 the Attlee Government was clearly struggling – was that really the time to warn of the risks of a Soviet takeover of Western Europe?

I can’t find the faintest trace of hope in 1984. Some readers claim the post-script essay on the introduction and development of Newspeak suggests IngSoc did not last, but that seems clutching at straws. By the end of the main novel, Winston is broken, looking forward to the bullet in the back of his head as a mercy. There is no suggestion that the future holds anything but the stamping of a boot on a face, forever.

Eton-educated George, or should that be Eric, was always a stranger in the slightly smelly, uncomfortable world of the working class. His sense of alienation from the working class – even, one could argue, his submerged class hatred – is vivid in 1984. They are an utterly alien species, with goldfish like memories, no class consciousness, and representing nothing of value. Winston is amazed at their stoicism, as well as their ability to reproduce so prolifically – Orwell shares similar sentiments in, for example, ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’. If the proles are the only hope, then there is no hope. I appreciate I am criticising ‘1984’ for not being a socialist manifesto, when of course it was never intended as such. But it handed a potent weapon to the critics of socialism, and all Orwell’s subsequent comments about the intention of his writing had little impact on the perception that he was a trenchant critic of English Socialism. Which is a pity, because there are few writers in the twentieth century who wrote as interestingly or as well as Orwell on social issues.

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell, 1939

Apart from 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell is best known for his journalism. And rightly so – his earlier novels have the feel of a writer learning his craft, not in terms of crafting a sentence, but in terms of developing a plot, story, and characters.

In this later novel (1939) George Bowling is a fat, forty something insurance salesman, trapped in a loveless marriage and yearning for the freedom of his bucolic boyhood of Edwardian England. The nostalgia is suffocating – I was reminded irresistibly of Peter Kay in some of the riffs on how boiled sweets were better before the War. The first person narrator insists he is not deliberately romanticising his past, and acknowledges there were many things wrong with pre-War England, but the overall impression is that the modern world is rotten with commercialism, population growth, and a lack of freedom. There are some vivid images to illustrate this, not least a sausage that tastes of fish. All highly clichéd – all of our boyhood summers were sunnier, all our food tasted more of itself, everything was less hurried and less threatening. As boys of course we could take pleasure from simple things that as older men we are bored with.

But Bowling’s ennui is much more deep rooted that this. He loathes his wife, barely tolerates his kids, and can find no pleasure in every day life. He is trapped, and looming over everything else is the threat of war. He is not particularly frightened of the coming war, but what he dreads even more is the post-war world, which he expects will be totalitarian. Here there are some strong echoes of 1984, with the boot stamping on the human face, forever, being foreshadowed by Bowling’s visions of post war society.

 

Orwell was a socialist, a member of the left wing Independent Labour Party, and had recently risked his life in the Spanish Civil War. But none of this political perspective appears in this novel. While Bowling fears the future, there is no suggestion anywhere that there is anything he or anyone else can do to control or affect it. There are some Communist and a trotyskist characters who make a very brief appearance in the novel, but they are dismissed as “People’s Front of Judea” figures. The Labour Party figure in the same scene is passed over without any suggestion that he, or what he represents ie working people getting together and trying to improve things is in any way a solution to the problems he identifies in society. There is an apolitical pessimism that sits strangely with what we know about Orwell’s politics – does this reflect some kind of personal despair with the way of the world – a giving up almost?

Orwell mines his journalism heavily in this novel, which adds to the suggestion that it was something written to generate funds rather than a work of inspiration. All through I kept getting echoes of other things he had written elsewhere (eg Bowling’s thoughts on urban myths, swans breaking your legs, etc). The novel spends about half of the narrative reminiscing on Bowling’s boyhood, and after a quick scene of domestic unhappiness he goes to try to rediscover his childhood haunts, and is inevitably disappointed.
All this is formulaic stuff. The plot device at the end of the novel, in which Bowling hears a radio SOS (do they still have them now?) and thinks it is for him, when it is not, followed swiftly by the accidental bombing of Little Binfield, a not so subtle pre-figuring of the war to come, is clumsy in the extreme. I must say however that my memories of some of the scenes, as well as the overall storyline of the novel, stayed with me strongly over 30+ years from first reading, so there must be more to it than I have given credit thus far.

If you want to be an Orwell completist, try this – it won’t divert you for long. But for coherent political analysis stick to the journalism.