Mr. Polly has life happen to him. A marriage, a store, an unhappy life. He yearns for more, but doesn't know what more. Early in the book, he sits on a turnstile contemplating suicide. He devises a plan and actually -- sort of -- pulls it off. Only instead of dying, he ends up a hero of sorts, saving the old lady next to him. No one dies, all the shops are burned to the ground, all the shop owners are secretly, and not so secretly, pleased to be rid of them and to be collecting insurance. Polly goes off, becomes a handyman and ferryman at an inn, fights off a dragon in the form of Uncle Jim, a relative who terrorizes the owner of the inn. He goes back to check on the wife he has deserted. She is doing fine, the owner of a tea shop. Mr. Polly returns to his new life to do odd jobs, contemplate, and enjoy the sunsets whenever possible. "Toiling and toiling we lay waste our hours." The Wordsworth poem comes to mind, as does Voltaire's order to tend your garden.
Not everything works, but enough does so that this is my favorite Wells book. A deft touch from a writer who usually uses a hammer.

If you have ever played secretly and subversively with language, resigned yourself to a path, or wept for no reason at all, then you'll see something in Mr Polly. A cutting, caustic, sad and tender novel. ( )

I never knew that H.G. Wells also wrote non-sci-fi books. So this read was different the expected. But no problem, still a book I liked. The life of Mr. Polly is not really something to covet. A bit of a depressed person, making the wrong choices and not always too friendly. His life story is interesing and includes bad and good times. And I wanted to know what will become of this guy.

http://boekenwijs.blogspot.com/2009/1... ( )

Another of Well's light comedies about ineffectual young men trapped in lower middle class existence in Edwardian England. Highly autobiographical, Wells escaped Polly's predicament by aggressive education and his Olympian writing talent. Polly has none of this, after an indifferent education and apprenticeship to a drapers (where he learned no real trade) he inherits some small amount of money. Intoxicated by freedom he marries unwisely and goes into a small drapery business of his own. Alas neither the business not his marriage prosper, and after a failed suicide attempt, which characteristically he bungles, in the process setting the street alight, he runs away and ends up as the odd-job man at a riverside Inn.

Wells' command of lower middle class English is superb, as well as Mr. Polly's lack of it. Unlike Wells' later works, the sociological and political polemics never overwhelm the story, but Wells never misses an opportunity to stick in the knife. Witness his hilarious description of Polly's indigestion as a result of his wife's cooking:

Mr. Polly went into the National School at six and he left the private school at fourteen, and by that time his mind was in much the same state that you would be in, dear reader, if you were operated upon for appendicitis by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather over-worked and under-paid butcher boy, who was superseded towards the climax of the operation by a left-handed clerk of high principles but intemperate habits--that is to say, it was in a thorough mess.

At an early age I was martyred for literature by insisting that Marx was mentioned in the book as "As a matter of fact all the elements of his troubles had been adequately diagnosed by a certain high-browed, spectacled gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a gold _pince_-_nez_, and writing for the most part in the beautiful library of the Reform Club. This gentleman did not know Mr. Polly personally...". I got sent to the housemaster for talking against the headmaster, a repulsive conservative, who insisted that the book was idealogically pure. But I digress. ( )

I can see that this would have been very witty when it was published, but I just could not get into it, despite being at the same time of life as Mr Polly. ( )