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Meanwhile was an odd little book. It was one of those great little books where people sit around talking about their ideas and nothing much happens except off stage. Off stage in this case was the short-lived general strike of 1926 and the fascists growing control of Italy. Basically its a book where posh people wake up and develop a social conscience, perhaps that means it should be classed as one of Wells' fantasy works.
In the preface Wells talks about how he was inspired to read it when he saw a woman sitting in an Italian garden reading and taking notes. With such a great image as its starting point I had to read it. Its very much a novel about what people think, how they think and why.
There's a lovely author character, who I believe to be Wells poking fun at himself, who is writing about the hope for a better world and the existence of utopias who is gently mocked by the women in the story for being unrealistic and a bit clueless about the way humans work. The main character is a young married woman who catches her husband in the process of having an affair, and then tries to encourage him to be a better person and sends him away. In many ways I think she's Wells answer to the characters so discussed in Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses. She is the rich pampered woman who is desperately trying to have clever or political thoughts which is quite a struggle for her but she does manage to get their in the end. There's a rather tragic moment where she decides she needs to write down her thoughts about life and breaks out these three gorgeous blank books that she's been saving for years, because she didn't know what to do with them, and then spent a few hours struggling and managed to write two sentences and thought she had worked very hard and done very well.
It was a hard book to get into, it seemed a strange set of people for Wells to be writing about, but in the end I did enjoy it and felt I had a better insight into what was happening at the time and more importantly what people were thinking about it.
In the preface Wells talks about how he was inspired to read it when he saw a woman sitting in an Italian garden reading and taking notes. With such a great image as its starting point I had to read it. Its very much a novel about what people think, how they think and why.
There's a lovely author character, who I believe to be Wells poking fun at himself, who is writing about the hope for a better world and the existence of utopias who is gently mocked by the women in the story for being unrealistic and a bit clueless about the way humans work. The main character is a young married woman who catches her husband in the process of having an affair, and then tries to encourage him to be a better person and sends him away. In many ways I think she's Wells answer to the characters so discussed in Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses. She is the rich pampered woman who is desperately trying to have clever or political thoughts which is quite a struggle for her but she does manage to get their in the end. There's a rather tragic moment where she decides she needs to write down her thoughts about life and breaks out these three gorgeous blank books that she's been saving for years, because she didn't know what to do with them, and then spent a few hours struggling and managed to write two sentences and thought she had worked very hard and done very well.
It was a hard book to get into, it seemed a strange set of people for Wells to be writing about, but in the end I did enjoy it and felt I had a better insight into what was happening at the time and more importantly what people were thinking about it.