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Tono Bungay may be one of the silliest titles for a novel that HG Wells ever came up with but, so far it's my favorite of all the books of his that I've read. It's not a sci-fi story, Tono Bungay refers to a "medicine" that his uncle "invents" half way through the book and makes them all rich. But what this book is is a fascinating look at late Victorian, Edwardian culture in South East England. So many wonderful insights into how things were, and why they were that way.
When he gets to London there's a part where he's describing the Victorian houses that have all been subdivided up and are being sublet, as the people who were originally supposed to have bought them all found they could move to the country, and the girls who were supposed to be the servants, all found better jobs at the factories, and so it was divided up. Which is how I think of these houses now, but I had no idea that they had always been that way. And there's so many little things like that that I just found fascinating.
The story is a fictional autobiography, and an interesting look at a young man full of ideals, who gets sidetracked by his friends libertine ideas, and then by money, and finally absorbed by science. He spends so much time looking at social position and how much it effects English society, and how the old ways were crumbling and what they were. There's an amazing chapter he writes about meeting his first wife, and how caught up with her he was that he failed to notice that they had nothing in common, that she had no ideas, and that they eventually had to part. It really reminded me of my parents. His arguments for why she was so incompatible just reminded me so much of everything Bill's said about his mother. The characters in this book just seemed so real. So full of conflict and change. It was obvious those he really cared about and those he didn't.
There were so many passages that struck me, if I was the type who underlined things, this book would be full of underlinings. As it is it's a lovely little hardback pocket size book from the modern library, published in 1909 I'd never think of defacing it so. But here is one passage that I remembered the page numbers of, so thought I'd write it here
When he gets to London there's a part where he's describing the Victorian houses that have all been subdivided up and are being sublet, as the people who were originally supposed to have bought them all found they could move to the country, and the girls who were supposed to be the servants, all found better jobs at the factories, and so it was divided up. Which is how I think of these houses now, but I had no idea that they had always been that way. And there's so many little things like that that I just found fascinating.
The story is a fictional autobiography, and an interesting look at a young man full of ideals, who gets sidetracked by his friends libertine ideas, and then by money, and finally absorbed by science. He spends so much time looking at social position and how much it effects English society, and how the old ways were crumbling and what they were. There's an amazing chapter he writes about meeting his first wife, and how caught up with her he was that he failed to notice that they had nothing in common, that she had no ideas, and that they eventually had to part. It really reminded me of my parents. His arguments for why she was so incompatible just reminded me so much of everything Bill's said about his mother. The characters in this book just seemed so real. So full of conflict and change. It was obvious those he really cared about and those he didn't.
There were so many passages that struck me, if I was the type who underlined things, this book would be full of underlinings. As it is it's a lovely little hardback pocket size book from the modern library, published in 1909 I'd never think of defacing it so. But here is one passage that I remembered the page numbers of, so thought I'd write it here
My aunt tall and slender and awkward in a simple blue homekeeping dress, an omnivorous reader and a very authentic wit, and the lady of pedigree, short and plump, dressed with Victorian fussiness, living at the intellectual level of palmistry and genteel fiction..