H. G. Wells (1866–1946)

It's funny, I remembered the central metaphor here all wrong--the Morlocks as gentle giants on the surface, the Eloi as exquisite vampires who prey on them. I guess I knew it didn't make any sense ("morlocks live underground" being surely part of our general cultural competency), but I didn't stop to think about it much and simply remembered this as one of the books my dad bribed me to read when I was a kid, the future world as magical and dark, and the further future as deeply chilling. show more It's interesting that it was that final future fantasy that stuck with me the most: the Morlocks and Eloi as a generic, if vivid, SF binary-opp society (and me getting all the details wrong), but the red dead sun, the slow-moving crabs, the slow fading of the last vestiges of the first heat of Creation and that polyp-like creature flopping and dying in the endless snow. Yikes! It makes you think, how long has it been since we had an end-of-the-world scenario that assumed our natural decline? Whether it's nuclear war or aliens or climate change or the matrix, present-day eschatology is all apocalypse, all the time. It's frivolous, histrionic, masturbatory. We are perfectionists who go to pieces at the slightest thing.

Contrast our Victorian Time Traveller and the "manly vigour of the race" (absolute Wellsian language here): these are people who finally have a basic scientific framework in place for understanding what life is, and they are eager to extend it even unto speculation about the building blocks of reality and what machines might be able to interfere with them, unto fables of devolution (from the precambrian we came, to the precambrian we shall return) and the interweaving of the biological and social (there are literally a billion ways to read the Es/Ms as mythologized capitalists and proles, and even Wells couldn't decide on just one, with the Time Traveller's shifting sense of where the (degenerate) mastery lies and where the (degenerate) abjection--in the end, mastery is abjection, and ownership of the means of production hasn't done the Morlocks any favours: I know I'd rather be a happy sexy Eloi even if my friends won't save me from drowning and the neighbours downstairs are getting ready to gut and fillet me.

It's shocking how it hits you right in your sense of what's real, in distinction, per above, from our currently favoured escapist end games tailormade for a romantic lead to shake his fist at God. Killing the deity and replacing him with evolution doesn't make us masters (in fact, having a skyfather makes us his favoured children); it displaces us once more from the centre, turns us into a mere chemical notion or momentary dissonance in the physical fabric. It is so much more tragic than the self-aggrandizing "end with violence" or "end with transcendence," since it happens so slowly there's no place for heroism at all. That reflects back on the nineteenth-century man of action at the centre too, of course, making of the Time Traveller, with his eugenic sensibilities and positivist social views and quickness to command the good small people and drub the bad, a kind of virile brain-brute, a veritable--to borrow the name of our local newspaper in "Victorian" Victoria, BC, if you can believe this--"Times-Colonist,"which when I was a kid I totally totally took to mean the "Colonist of Time," the paper that sails on through the times, broadsheets trim and newsprint-gray, collecting the events of the day and placing on them its imprimatur. "We were there. We told you how it was." On this day in history, the headlines said, TIME TRAVELLER PLANTS FLAG OF SCIENCE IN THE YEAR OF OUR WORLDVIEW 802,701.

It's actually just that the one paper the Times bought the other (the Colonist, still a fucked-up name). But in that light, how ripe is this book for any number of "Grendel"-style dip-and-flip inversions that expose the colonizer's total failure to get any of it right? Not only the gentle Morlocks as outlined above, but how about the smart Eloi, whose society actually sounds largely amazing, trying to drum up the interest to dim their sensibilities and teach this week's angry weirdo from the past how to speak their language and that they give of themselves to the Morlocks at the end of their lives because sustenance is a sacrament? Or the proto-(post-post-post-)fascist Morlocks that come back and invade Edwardian London and rule there? Some of these already exist, as many later writers have tried to fill out or address the Time Traveller's evident bewilderment. And it's a neat trick--Wells can't see his own biases, so he catapults his protgonist past the coming socialist utopia that the author himself certainly believed in and into a world so different that any attempt to navigate it is bound to end up as frustrated as the linen-suited orientalist trying to get a rickshaw. No wonder he was the blockbuster writer of his time! He's really good at being all things to all people. show less

If he had dared H G Wells might have titled his novel “Sex and Politics”, but he had enough trouble getting this novel published without any additional provocation. As he was very interested in both sex and politics it is surprising that he waited until his nineteenth novel to write passionately about both, but when he finally did he produced an outstanding book that ranks among his best. Published in 1911 the centre-piece political event is the Liberal Party’s 1909 “budget for the show more people”, where the Commons challenged the power of the House of Lords and so today “The New Machiavelli” reads a bit like an historical novel, but in 1911 it would have been extremely topical especially as Wells’ scathing pen portraits of political figures would have been easily recognisable.

The novel is written in the first person: Richard Remington is writing his memoirs reflecting on his short but eventful political career, which had been wrecked by scandal. The reader therefore knows the end of the story and so the interest is in how it all happened and this gives Wells the opportunity to delve deeply into political, social and philosophical issues without having to maintain a tension in the story. Remington is in fact writing his autobiography and he starts with his childhood and upbringing and this has led some readers to conclude that this is Wells’ most autobiographical novel. While there is certainly plenty of Wells in Remington and he uses Remington to put forward some of his own views on society and politics it is dangerous to assume that this is in any way autobiographical: for example Remington went to a public school and on to Cambridge, then was elected to Parliament as a liberal MP. Wells did none of these things but did stand for parliament as a Labour MP later in life.

Remington was initially supported by the influential Baileys; the husband and wife team based on Sidney and Beatrice Webb, but once inside the Commons he fell out of step with the Liberal party. He married a wealthy heiress which gave him the independent means to follow his own path, he wrote pamphlets he organised groups, but increasingly saw the Liberals as a party made of individuals too concerned with their own position and influence to make any lasting changes. He looked across the floor of the House to the Tory benches and saw a beleaguered party who he thought might give him a better platform for the changes he wanted to make. He resigned from the Liberal Party and stood as a Tory at the next election and was successful again. He gathered around himself a group of young intellectuals and edited a weekly pamphlet that put forward their view point; he was creating a party for change within the Tory party. It all came crashing around his ears however when his love affair with his closest party worker Isabel Rivers became public and he was hounded out of the country.

Remington went into politics because he believed that he could make a difference. Very much like Wells he is appalled at the muddle-headedness that he saw all around him and believed that better education would be a basis for change and he sets out his arguments in some detail. Later in the novel he embraced eugenics which might make modern day readers shudder, but we would be much more inclined to support his views on women's suffrage. These are clearly Wells’ views and so he is able to indulge himself through Remington, but his indulgences are part and parcel of the political novel he is writing, he has Remington say:

“My political conceptions were perfectly plain and honest. I had one constant desire ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the Empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and discipline to build up a constructive and controlling State out of my worlds confusions. We had I saw to suffuse education with public intention, to develop a new better living generation with a collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in every human affair, and particularly to catch that escaped, world-making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial enterprise and bring it back to the service of the general good.”

There are fascinating sections on the Baileys influential groupings and on the groups within the political party’s. The glittering dinners, the weekends in the country, the importance of friends and contacts create a viable and credible scenario of the politics of the time. Perhaps the most interesting development is Remington’s attempt to create his own party within the Tory party which anticipates the Militant Tendency’s attempts to influence the Labour party in England in the 1980’s.

It is a sex scandal that finally brings Remington down and we know this from the very start of the novel and so Wells is keen to show his hero as a man with normal passionate desires. We learn of his initiation into the adult world of sex and how difficult it was for a young man at that time to find out anything at all about sex. Wells/Remington says:

“Humanity is begotten by desire, lives by desire” but Victorian/ Edwardian society does its best to hush it all up. He goes further to claim that society/politics “penalises abandonment to love so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes, people beauty-blind, who don’t understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the supreme claim of good births………people almost of necessity averse from this most fundamental aspect of existence.”

The final part of the book describes Remington’s passionate affair with Isabel Rivers. He confesses to his wife Margaret and she is willing to forgive him and even to manage their marriage while the affair continues, but this would be unacceptable in public life and Remington rails against the hypocrisy of it all. He must in the end choose between the two women, knowing that if he continues his love affair with Isabel his career is finished.

This final part of the novel sounds like a cri de coeur from Wells whose own affair with Amber Reeves was causing him to make choices imposed on him by society, choices that are difficult to make in the heat of a passionate love affair. The affair and its ramifications are beautifully written with an intensity that impressed D H Lawrence and will keep the reader gripped until the end.

I have no doubt that The New Machiavelli is a fine achievement: it gives us a believable character struggling to do great things in a society that will not allow him to stray from the narrow path of its own hide bound sexuality. Along the way Wells gets to satirise leading political figures and air his own views on politics and society. London is beautifully described as are the horrors of the industrial Midlands. It all works magnificently and a five star read. show less