Once upon a time there was a future. H.G. Wells had seen it. Apparently it was going to be naked. Well that’s certainly the impression one gets from the dollops of sex folded into David Lodge’s novel on Wells’ life, A Man of Parts.
I call the book a novel because it’s called one on the cover. But in reality I think Lodge has managed to out-Hamlet Hamlet and given us a new mixed genre perhaps best described as historico-biographical-novelistic-political-critical-gossip. ‘Nearly everything that happens in this narrative,’ we are told in a short preface, ‘is based on factual sources’. Once you tuck in, however, it’s left to you to chew over each detail and guess at its reality or otherwise. Quoted letters, one assumes, are factual sources. Wells’ erotic pillow-talk probably not. And everything in between?
Lodge’s discursive-psycho-romance ostensibly records Wells’ reminiscences as he dies in London at the close of the Second World War. These reminiscences are structured primarily by his succession of lovers . A lengthy parade. I had no idea Wells was such a vigorously conscientious practitioner, as well as a preacher, of sexual liberation. He seems to have been particularly fearless about liberating his friends’ virginal daughters. A secondary theme is Well’s career as writer, and then as socialist. Behind all, the sickeningly honeyed slide of Edwardian England into the First World War hovers with Minerva’s owl in the dusk.
The narrative is mainly carried out in the third-person, and proceeds on the whole chronologically, which encourages you to take it as a particularly vivid biography. Until, that is, you get to one of the sections in which Lodge puts us briefly inside Wells’ mind to eavesdrop on conversations between himself and an unbidden voice in his head. Then you feel like you’ve been caught out for taking it all at face value.
Of course Lodge is entirely honest about his enterprise. But there is a hint of a suspicion that this is an imaginatively fleshed-out biography put inside a framing narrative device to turn it into a novel. With the danger being that it comes out of the blender as neither. On the whole, however, the book does succeed, even if the conceit of Well’s elderly mind being a ‘time machine’ able to roam from past to present never really takes off. As a simpler linear account of Wells’ life and work it is entertaining, well plotted, and exciting. It makes the case for the importance of a writer I for one sometimes think of as most interesting for having inspired the Tommy Steele musical Half a Sixpence.
Some moments are funny; ‘It seemed that she wished him to rescue her from lesbianism, and honour required that he should at least try’. Others generate substantial dramatic tension (Wells and his teenage lover being caught by her father at Paddington station is particularly well handled).
What is most exciting, however, is Lodge’s success in capturing a moment barely outside of living memory when intelligent men and women believed in the radical promise of tomorrow to a degree unimaginable today. Now we have Tories telling us we can have more of the same, but more efficient, and Labour telling us we can have more of the same, but for free. H. G. Wells, however, convinced a generation that Utopia was there for the taking. World Government, the rational utilisation of industrial production to secure plenty for all, and a life of emotional and sexual fulfilment beyond the bonds of monogamy. It’s hard to know whether to applaud the ambition of their dreams or to deride the folly of ideas which played out so sadly over the last century.
In truth, that moment is now as distant as the French Revolution or the English Civil War. Wells believed that the he would help build a new world from the ashes of the capitalist state. But he lived to see two world wars in which that very state acted as the only possible defender of the concrete freedoms he professed to believe in, and the rise of radical empires bent on imposing a ‘rational’ World Government which was a sinister parody of his own ideals. Sixty-five years after his death the capitalist state thrives. Expecting no redemption, we’ve had to come to live with the devil we can’t do without.
Comments