Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells
I love H. G. Wells. The History of Mr Polly is one of those stories that changes how you think; The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon, and The Island of Dr Moreau are all classics that I have returned to many times; I have enjoyed Kipps, and Mr Britling Sees It Through, and various short story collections, from which Country of the Blind stands out in particular as absolutely, chillingly horrible. He is undoubtedly a great writer, and even if you don’t enjoy reading his work the weight of his influence on other writers, and upon popular culture right up to the present day, is undeniable.
In the Days of The Comet is one of Wells’s utopian novels, and compared to everything else of his that I’ve read, it’s disappointing. The plot isn’t particularly interesting: a mysterious comet hits earth, magically cures humanity of evil, and everyone lives groovily ever after in a bizarre Edwardian free-love paradise. The tale is told through the eyes of a naive young socialist who probably reflects a part of Wells’s political thinking at the time, and the conclusion appears to be something in the line of wish-fulfilment on the part of the author, who was apparently rather a horny old devil. Autobiographically it’s illuminating, the reader can see parts of Wells’s psychology laid bare in his idea of what would make a better world. I imagine that in conjunction with a decent biography this novel can reveal much about the author, more so than many of his more famous works.
The writing is never bad and there is much to hold the reader’s interest, but the story itself is weak in comparison to the author’s usual standard, and the characters are not as well realised as those that appear in his later works, being mostly two-dimensional like many of the protagonists of his earlier proto-sci-fi stories. Even the narrator seems to have been created to satirise an extinct political breed, the angry young chap, rather than out of any need to explore or understand that sort of personality. There are also some strange bletherings about God and spirituality which sit uncomfortably with everything else of his that I’ve read. And like much of the utopian literature I’ve encountered before, it suffers from a simplistic view of humanity, and infuriates with it’s magical fix-all recipe for global harmony. Perhaps that’s the problem: Wells was at his best when he was just trying to scare us, rather than articulating his ideas on how an ideal world might be ordered.