review of H.G. Wells's "Tono-Bungay"

review of

H.G. Wells's "Tono-Bungay"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

2315. "review of H. G. Wells's "Tono-Bungay""

- complete version

- credited to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- uploaded to my Critics websiteMarch 10, 2025

- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticWells.html

review of

H.G. Wells's "Tono-Bungay"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 10, 2025

The complete review is here:

http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticWells.html

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7242359439

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223849352-tono-bungay

It seems to me that everytime I review a Wells bk I explain that reading his "The Time Machine" was important to me as a young person & that ever since I look forward to reading something new by him. I probably also mention that when I was young I found a picture of him & his wife at a nudist colony. They were sitting on the porch of a cabin. He was wearing light colored socks & sandals & nothing else. He was smoking a pipe & reading a newspaper. Black & white nudist pictures torn from a magazine were scattered by the side of a road where I walked, presumably by a pervert trying to get them into the possession of kids - since it was mainly kids who walked & wd, therefore, find them.

I've always been intrigued by the title of this one & didn't want to know anything about it before I read it so that it wdn't be spoiled for me. I was hoping it wd be science fiction. I've read his straight novels too & liked them but I prefer the SF. As it turned out it's more of a straight novel but the main character is a scientist of sorts so it's a little like ScFi too.

"BOOK THE FIRST

"The Days Before Tono-Bungay Was Invented" - p 1

I picked that & the following longer quote to show the writing style. The bk was written in 1908 & the writing seems just about right for that era: still a bit 19th century.

"CHAPTER THE FIRST

"Of Bladesover House, and My Mother; and the Constitution of Society

"Most people in the world seem to live "in character": they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of thei type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than "character actors." They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. This has been my lot and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel." - p 3

This is, basically, a bildungsroman, a novel about the development of one protagonist. But it's also a novel of manners, in a sense, insofar as it explores class characteristics.

"It is curious to note that to-day that down-trodden organ-playing creature, the Church of England village Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as the seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the vicar but above the "vet," artists and summer visitors squeezed in above or below this point according to their appearance and expenditure, and then in a carefully arranged scale came the tenantry, the butler and housekeeper, the village shopkeeper, the head keeper, the cook, the publican, the second keeper, the blacksmith (whose status was complicated by his daughter keeping the post-office-and a fine hash she used to make of telegrams too!) the village shopkeeper's eldest son, the first footman, younger sons of the village shopkeeper, his first assistant, and so forth. . . ." - p 13

Call me an American but I find such class division hierarchies extremely annoying. Alas, such divisions exist in the US too. They're particularly prominent in the Art World where any idiot rich woman can give her aesthetic opinion about something & expect people that she perceives as lower in her classist hierarchy to bow down to it. The people expected to bow down are usually men who actually know how to do things - unlike the rich women whose class-inherited position as 'boss' fuels their imbecilic certainty of entitlement. How many times have I been condescended to by people so much more ignorant than me that it's astounding that even they can't see it?! But, of course, they can't see it b/c their entitlement enables them to keep their heads fully planted up their perfumed asses.

The protagonist recounts his early reading explorations:

"I remember that among others I tried a translation of Plato's "Republic" then, and found extraordinarily little interest in it; I was much too young for that; but "Vathek"-"Vathek" was glorious stuff. That kicking affair! When everybody had to kick!" - p 22

Well, I've read a little Plato & I've read all of William Beckford's "Vathek". I don't really remember either, I read both 50 yrs or so ago. Still, I remember that "Vathek" was part of my Gothic reading, I discovered Gothic novels partially b/c I read that the Surrealists liked them. If one thinks of Shelley's "Frankenstein" as Gothic then that's high on the list of ones I've appreciated - as well as Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto". The rest didn't really do anything for me although I'm still open to the genre. Anyway, the point is that even tho this novel was written 117 yrs before my review of it there was still immediately something in it that I cd relate to.

The protagonist is rejected by a more upper class playmate:

""We don't want you to play with us at all," said Archie.

""Yes, we do," said Beatrice.

""He drops his aitches like anything."

""No, 'e doesn't," said I, in the heat of the moment.

""There you go!" he cried. "E, he says. E! E! E!"" - p 35

The protagonist's uncle is his main counterpart in the story:

"I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was something in his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phrased itself at once as Teddiness-a certain Teddidity. To describe it in any other terms is more difficult." - p 50

Is there an "Unteddy" counterpart?

Wells, like most good writers, has an ear for slang:

""By Gosh!" he said. "Lord!" he cried. His glasses fell off. He disappeared, replacing them, behind a pile of boxed-up bottles of blood mixture. "Eleven thousand virgins!" I heard him cry. The glass was banged down. "O-ri-ental Gums!"" - p 52

Now whether anyone ever used "Eleven thousand virgins!" or "O-ri-ental Gums!" as exclamations I don't know - but fictional or factual I find them entertaining. If I cd remember to say them I'd drop them into a conversation.

The uncle has a get-rich quick scheme that involves creating a quack cure-all. He explains the economic justification for it.

"The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy."

[..]

""I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go the House of Lords!" - p 66

I'm reminded of someone that I love to hate, Martin Shkreli:

"In September 2015, Shkreli was widely criticized when Turing obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price to insurance companies from $13.50 to $750.00 (USD) per pill.

In 2017, Shkreli was convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and up to $7.4 million in fines. In the civil antitrust case, Shkreli was fined a further $64.6 million to be repaid to victims. In May 2022, he was released early from the low-security federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. He is permanently banned from serving as an officer of any publicly traded company."

He served less than 7 yrs in prison & his 'business model' is still that of the pharmaceutical industry in general to this day. There are people in prison for life-w/o-parole who committed lesser crimes than Shkreli.

Anyway, Wells cd once again be considered prescient (even tho he was hearkening back to snake-oil hucksters) for his tale of health market manipulation.

"He concluded as he often did with these talks. "I must invent something,-that's about what I must do. Zzzz. Some convenience. Something people want. . . . Strike out. . . . You can't think, George, of anything everybody wants and hasn't got? I mean something you could turn out retail under a shilling, say? Well, you think, whenever you haven't got anything better to do. See?"" - p 67

Wells uses the novel as a way to describe the evolution of London:

"Street after street must have been rushed into being, Campden Town way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the Victoria region and all over minor suburbs of the south side. I am doubtful if many of these houses had any long use as the residences of single families, if from the very first their tenants did not makeshift and take lodgers and sublet." - p 86

"But any one who doubts this thing is going on right up to to-day need only spend an afternoon in hunting for lodgings in any of the regions in London I have named." - p 88

Wells seems somewhat anti-industrialist:

"The south side had no protecting estates. Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London port, is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean clear social assurance of the West End." - p 98

Alas, he also seems somewhat anti-semitic:

"it must have been in my early student days-and discovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displaying Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities, and a concourse of bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberish between the shops and the barrows." - p 99

Have you ever noticed that when bigots encounter a language they don't speak that they characterize it as "incomprehensible gibberish"?! - rather than acknowledge their own ignorance. No doubt there are Jewish people who pursue greed at the expense of everyone else - just like so many other ethnic (or otherwise) groups. However, these people don't represent the overall culture they come from more than any other person from any other group does. There are generous Jews, intelligent Jews, creative Jews, nice Jews - just like there are generous Anarchists, intelligent Anarchists, creative Anarchists, nice Anarchists - & dishonest Anarchists, mean Anarchists, etc..

Finally, the novel gets to its title:

""It's the secret of vigour. Didn't you read the label?"

""Yes, but--"

""It's selling like hot cakes."

""And what is it?" I pressed.

""Well," said my uncle, and then leant forward and spoke softly under cover of his hand, "it's nothing more or less than . . ."

"(But here an unfortunate scruple intervenes. After all, Tono-Bungay is still a marketable commodity and in the hads of purchasers, who bought it from-among other vendors-me. No! I am afraid I cannot give it away.)" - pp 128-129

Wells's attn to detail gets into the production line:

"We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined glass trough made slippery with running water. At one end a girl held them up to the light, put aside any that were imperfect and placed the others in the trough; the filling was automatic; at the other end a girl slipped in the cork an drove it home with a little mallet, Each tank, the little one for the vivifying ingredients and the big one for distilled water, had a level indicator, and inside I had a float arrangement that stopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low. Another girl stood ready with my machine to label the corked bottles and hand them to the three packers, who slipped them into their outer papers and put them, with a pad of corrugated paper between each pair, into a little groove from which they could be made to slide neatly into position in our standard packing case." - p 154

The protagonist, now prosperous thanks to Tono-Bungay, is enabled to get married to his drearily conventional fiancée:

"We were both in certain directions unusually ignorant and simple; we were temperamentally antagonistic, and we hadn't-I don't think we were capable of-an idea in common. She was young and extraordinarily conventional-she seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the idea of her class-and I was young and sceptical, enterprising and passionate; the two links that held us together were the intense appeal her physical beauty had for me, and her appreciation of her importance in my thoughts." - p 161

These days, I'm very preoccupied w/ this "she seemed never to have an idea of her own but always the idea of her class" - except that I'd change "class" to "subculture". It's rare for me to talk w/ anyone who has any ideas of their own, even though they seem to be under the delusion that what they express originates w/ them. Instead, they're expressing 'opinions' that are of their subculture but originate somewhere else, somewhere unknown to all people expressing these 'opinions'.

A conversation occurs in wch a different society were to form.

""Ewart," I said, "this is like Doll's Island. . . . Suppose," I reflected, "an unsuccessful man laid seige to a balcony and wouldn't let his rival come near it?"

""Move him on," said Ewart, "by a special regulation. As one does organ-grinders. No difficulty about that. And you could forbid it-make it against the etiquette. No life is decent without etiquette. . . . And people obey etiquette sooner than laws . . ."" - p 176

Indeed. "people obey etiquette sooner than laws": I think I probably agree w/ that & find it central to maintaining a somewhat peaceful society. Alas, once the etiquette loses its strength & anything goes than we're generally in trouble. But it's not anarchy, it's lack of agreement - even agreement to disagree.

Anyway, the marriage fails, predictably enuf:

"Who can tell the story of the slow estrangement of two married people, the weakening of first this bond and then that of that complex contact? Least of all can one of the two participants. Even now, with an interval of fifteen years to clear it up for me, I still find a mass of impressions of Marion as confused, as discordant, as unsystematic and self-contradictory as life." - p 183

This was probably my least favorite Wells novel that I've read & it's possible to attribute my lack of enthusiasm to the tedious telling of the main character's love life. I reckon this part of the story helped 'flesh it out', put the overall story in a broader context & added that romance that popular novels can't seem to do w/o.. but I just found it boring.

"The end of our intolerable situation came suddenly and unexpectedly, but in a way that I suppose was almost inevitable. My alienated affections wandered, and I was unfaithful to Marion.

"I won't pretend to extenuate the quality of my conduct. I was a young and fairly vigorous man; all my appetite for love had been roused and whetted and none of it had been satisfied by my love affair and my marriage. I had pursued an elusive gleam of beauty to the disregard of all else, and it had failed me." - p 188

It's unclear to me whether Wells, himself, was a Socialist (or some variation thereon) but his character seems to be similarly close-to-Socialist-w/o-necessarily-being-so.

"Many men and women nowadays take up some concrete aspect of Socialism or social reform. But Socialism for me has always been a little bit too human, too set about with personalities and foolishness. It isn't my line. I don't like things so human." - p 202

The science part of this fiction is that the protagonist is an inventor who's interest is in the nascent adventure of flying.

""I mean it," I said. "I've been thinking it over. I've made up my mind. It's no good arguing. I shall go in for work-real work. No! This isn't work; it's only laborious cheating. But I've got an idea! It's an old idea-I thought of years ago, but it came back to me. Look here! Why should I fence about with you? I believe the time has come for flying to be possible. Real flying!"" - p 204

Do you ever think about expressions like "I've made up my mind" or "I'm going to get down to it"? The former, as shown by its use in the above-quoted excerpt, has been in use for at least 117 yrs. I think that's pretty remarkable considering that, to me at least, it doesn't make much sense: How does one 'make up' one's mind? Why "up"?

"I was then beginning to get keen upon the soaring experiments I had taken on from the results then to hand of Lilienthal, Pilcher and the Wright Brothers. I was developing a glider into a flyer." - p 218

The basis of his wealth & that of his uncle's was illusion:

"It was all a monstrous payment for courageous fiction, a gratuity in return for the one reality of human life-illusion. We gave them a feeling of hope and profit" - p 224

Well, Wells even squeaks in radioactivity. Radioactivity is sd to've been discovered in 1896, a mere 8 yrs before this novel. Wells warns of its dangers in the context of greed.

"And first as to quap; quap, sir, is the most radioactive stuff in the world. That's quap! It's a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium,ythorium, thorium, carium, and new things, too. There's a stuff called Xk-provisionally. There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What it is, how it got made, I don't know. It's like as if some young creator had been playing about there." - p 227

What a load of quap!

"Among other things that my uncle offered for, he tried very hard to buy the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, and run them on what he called modern lines, and when they resisted him he talked very vigorously for a time of organizing a rivial enterprise." - p 232

This interested me b/c in 2020 & after I was doing layperson medical research for some bks I was writing & the Lancet was of some importance to this - & here's Wells making reference to it 112 yrs earlier!

More of the "Novel of Manners", more specifically matters of class behavior;

""We aren't keeping pace with our own progress, George. We got to. We're bumping against new people, and they set up to be gentlefolks-etiquette dinners and all the rest of it. They give themselves airs and expect us to be fish-out-of-water. We aren't going to be. They think we've no Style. Well, we give them Style for our advertisements, and we're going to give 'em Style all through . . . . You needn't be born to it to dance well on the wires of the Bond Street tradesmen. See?" - p 244

George goes to Africa to collect quap in an effort to revitalize the deteriorating fortunes of his uncle. Little does he realize what a disaster this is going to be.

"Here and there strange blossoms woke the dank intensities of green with a trumpet call of colour. Things crept among the jungle and peeped and dashed back rustling into stillness. Always in the sluggishly drifting, opaque water were eddyings and stirrings; little rushes of bubbles came chuckling up light-heartedly from this or that submerged conflict and tragedy; now and again were crocodiles like a stranded fleet of logs basking in the sun. Still it was by day, a dreary stillness broken only by insect sounds and the creaking and flapping of our progress, by the calling of the soundings and the captain's confused shouts; but in the night as we lay moored to a clump of trees the darkness brought a thousand swampy things to life and out of the forest came screaming and howlings, screaming and yells that made us glad to be afloat." - p 332

"This is no imaginative comparison of mine. To my mind radio-activity is a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a contagious disease. It spreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others and those too presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out of coherent existence." - p 336

"Suppose, indeed, that is to be the end of our planet; no splendid climax and finale, no towering accumulation of achievements, but just-atomic decay! I add that to the ideas of the suffocating comet, the dark body out of space, the burning out of the sun, the distorted orbit, as a new and far more possible end" - p 337

George and his uncle have had to flee & the uncle is dying.

"Close at hand was the doctor with one of those cruel and idiotic injection needles modern science puts in the hands of these half-educated young men, keeping my uncle flickeringly alive for no reason whatsoever." - p 372

Ha ha! That's so much my sentiment of over 100 yrs later that I have to once again applaud Wells for his prescience!

"As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me, certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste." - p 391

That's almost my review. Wells ends w/ a criticism of England, one might think that's what the whole bk is.

"It is quaint, no doubt, this England-it is even dignified in places-and full of mellow associations. That does not alter the quality of the realities these robes conceal. The realities are greedy trade, base profit-seeking, bold advertisement; and kingship and chivalry, spite of this wearing of treasured robes, are as dead among it all" - p 394

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