William John Locke (1863–1930)

I may have said this before, but William J. Locke is really good at creating individuals. His people are the farthest thing from stock characters you can imagine. So much so that a good part of the novel kept me guessing, who is going to end up with whom? Maybe nobody's going to end up with anybody? None of them are "fated" to be a match, it all just kind of works out. The storytelling is anything but cliché.

So, in this tale you have Zora, the larger-than-life young widow who's determined show more to find a mission in life; Septimus, the good-hearted, head-in-the-clouds inventor who's worried that he's spent too much time on machinery and not enough on being a human; Clem Sypher, the booming businessman who believes in his quack medicinal remedy above anything else in heaven or earth; and slightly less well-defined, Zora's sister Emmy, an actress who seems fine and happy until she's not...

Septimus is the real joy in this book, as he's so kind and simple, while also being very oblivious and unintentionally funny. He reconfigures the bell-pull in his house to fire pistol shots, as his butler can't hear anything else. Any spare moment unfailingly results in a new invention coming to mind--a wildly impractical invention, but always with the best intentions. His gravest fear is.... oh, I'll just let him explain it:

"Whatever one does or tries to do, one should insist on remaining human. It's good to be human, isn't it? I once knew a man who was just a complicated mechanism of brain encased in a body. His heart didn't beat; it clicked and whirred. It caused the death of the most perfect woman in the world."

He looked dreamily into the blue ether between sea and sky. Zora felt strangely drawn to him.

"Who was it?" she asked softly.

"My mother," said he.

They had paused in their stroll, and were leaning over the parapet above the railway line. After a few moments' silence he added, with a faint smile:—

"That's why I try hard to keep myself human—so that, if a woman should ever care for me, I shouldn't hurt her."

See? For a lot of the book he's the most impractical little guy you could imagine, but occasionally he comes out with something like that and you realize he's the most human person in the book. Lovely. show less

"Here we are in the middle of a Fairy Tale. What are the Powers of Darkness in your case, Sir Red Cross Knight?"
     "Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy," said Sypher savagely. (54)

I read this novel as part of my project to read all the remaining Victorian scientist novels. It's not Victorian, though, and Septimus Dix is an inventor, not a scientist. There's no indication of scientific training or scientific research; he designs things (mostly weapons, but occasionally other things, though show more only the guns are practical). He is certainly an absent-minded inventor, seemingly even a savant, as it seems like the gun designs just kind of come to him, but he doesn't view the world differently because of his scientific perspective. (He definitely views it differently, though. He's a very odd duck.)

Still, I'm glad I read it because it was delightful. Serialized in American Magazine from May 1908 to June 1909 under the title Simple Septimus, the novel follows four people: the inventor Septimus, the patent medicine hawker Clem Sypher, the would-be actress Emmy Oldrieve, and the Zora Middlemist, the imposing young widow who ties them all together. Zora is Emmy's sister, Clem's muse, and Septimus's idol; her husband died just six weeks into their marriage because he was an alcoholic, and she swore off men and marriage only to draw into her orbit two of the oddest men who had ever been.

The book is aimless at times, but usually fun, and occasionally insightful and heartfelt. Septimus and Clem are perfectly ridiculous characters. Septimus, for example, hired a burglar as butler, but doesn't worry because one can't burgle a place if one lives in it, so he has nothing to fear; Septimus spends most of the year away from home, though, because he's afraid he gets on the butler's nerves, and he hates causing offense. Clem sells patent medicine, but unlike Edward Ponderevo in Wells's Tono-Bungay (serialized at almost exactly the same time), Clem earnestly believes in his medicine, and considers himself a Friend of Humanity for hawking it incessantly.

Septimus falls in love with Zora, Clem thinks Zora is his muse, Emmy gets in trouble by way of an extramarital affair, and basically this constellation of characters interact back and forth for 300 pages in increasingly weird circumstances. Over the course of the novel, they all grow up a little bit, thanks to the influence of the others; four people who had each removed themselves from humanity in some kind of way end up discovering the salvation than can only come from contact with other humans.

The one-volume publication was one of the ten bestselling books of 1909 in the United States (Locke himself was a British colonial), but as far as I know, it has mostly been forgotten in the present day and age, so I'm glad my incessant search for scientists in British literature brought me to it, and I'm sad I have to remove it from my list of them. show less

Four stars based on the first and largest part of the book, which was funny and original. The last third or so was pretty melodramatic and felt like a downer to me, but things ended well. With William J. Locke, I've discovered that you never can quite tell what's going to happen next, and his characters are sometimes a random bunch.

Sir Marcus Ordeyne, an ex-schoolteacher turned nobleman after some distant relatives die, is priggishly pleased with his chosen lifestyle. He's a detached, show more philosophic book collector who can toss off medieval or ancient names and stories in regular conversation. He's actually a pretty nice guy but in need of some shaking up. This happens when he meets Carlotta, a teenage Turkish beauty who was trying to elope but was abandoned by her fiancé. She appeals to Sir Marcus for advice, and circumstances dictate that he more or less adopt her. This scandalizes London. It also begins the process of humanizing Sir Marcus. Carlotta is alarming and charming, and Sir Marcus's reactions play very well.
Things get topsy turvy by the end and there are mental and moral catastrophes that are darker than the rest of the book. But the bulk of it felt so original that I overall enjoyed it. show less

A collection of stories about.... well, exactly what the title says. Aristide Pujol is a vibrant Frenchman with a genius for always landing on his feet even if he hasn't a penny in his pocket. His well-meaning schemes always have unforeseen twists, but his joie de vivre and many innate talents save the day. Funny and enjoyable. How can one be so intense and yet so lighthearted? He's a bit of a caricature, but one with depth.