The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

(Book Review)

Spoiler Warning

          Like many great classic books, this book is somewhat a victim of its own success.  Is it even possible to read this book unspoiled these days?

            If somehow it is—if somehow you’ve managed to make it this far in life without having the plot of this book spoiled for you—then don’t read this review.  This is one of those books that deserves to be read with the reader knowing nothing about the story.  The author skillfully creates an atmosphere of eerie mystery, and knowing in advance where he is headed would spoil that mystery. 

            I will say this though—I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  It’s highly readable, quite short, and fantastically chilling.  You can easily read it in a couple days.

          …If you’ve already read this book, or already know the plot anyway, then you can continue on reading my review below.

My History With This Book

          Like several other books I’ve - reviewed - on - this - book - review project recently, this book isn’t entirely a new read for me, but rather it is a classic book that I read a simplified version of in my childhood, and am now finally getting around to reading the real thing.

            (When I say “simplified version”, in this case I’m referring just to the simplified prose.  This book is so short already that there wasn’t much in the plot to simplify or abridge, other than to just take the language that H.G. Wells had intended for an adult in the Victorian age and make it readable for a modern child.)

           The book made quite an impression on me.  It was just the right level of creepy story that fascinates a child.  A race of underground monsters preying on a race of defenseless children—this is just the kind of stuff that nightmares are made of!  That, plus the horrifying end that poor Weena came to—being lost among the forest fire and the monsters, and never found again!  The story burned itself into my memory.  I only read it once as a child, but I could remember it perfectly all these years later.

            I also read The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (W), also in a simplified children’s version, and I believe it was these two books together that first made me self-identify as a “science fiction” fan.  Before H.G. Wells, I had no idea what science fiction was.  After H.G. Wells, I would always head straight to the “science fiction” section on any trip to a bookstore or library.

            I went on to read three more books by H.G. Wells—this time in their unabridged and unsimplified form—The Invisible Man (W) around 6th grade and In the Days of the Comet (W) in 7th grade.  The authentic Victorian era prose was somewhat of a struggle for me at that age.  I pushed on through it, but it was more work than reward.  And then after force-marching myself through In the Days of the Comet, I left Wells alone and moved on to other authors.

            I read one last Wells book when I was 18: The Island of Dr Moreau (W).  By this time Wells’s prose was no longer a struggle, and I enjoyed the book.  But I since then have not returned to Wells.

            In a post I wrote years ago, I listed H.G Wells’s books in my List of Books that Changed my Life.   (For the purposes of that blog post, I was defining “changed my life” as “opened up new areas of interest for me.”)  Something I neglected to make clear in that post, and have felt slightly guilty about ever since, is that I never read the authentic versions of either War of the Worlds or The Time Machine.  However authentic or not, the simplified versions I read as a child were nonetheless real reading experiences, and they did make a real impression on me, and so I included them on my list.

            But, it was probably high time I got around to reading the original.  And so, I sat down with the original 1895 version of The Time Machine.

           

The Review

          The first thing to note about this book is how short it is.  My edition was only 76 pages (albeit that was with somewhat small print, but still!)  It is short enough that I read the whole thing easily in a couple afternoons.

          As for the prose, although I had found H.G. Wells’s prose somewhat hard going as an adolescent, from an adult perspective this book is easily readable.  And enjoyably readable.

            Anything from the Victorian era may intimidate modern readers, but in many cases it need not.  Despite its age, this book reads smoothly and fluidly.  Victorian era prose is slightly more formal than modern prose, but other than that this book could easily be placed in a shelf of contemporary fiction, and no one would know the difference.

            In fact, as someone who had remembered Wells’s prose as hard work, I was now pleasantly surprised to realize what a skillful story teller he is. 

            It’s probably better to just show this rather than attempt to describe this, so to illustrate how skillful his story telling is, I’ll quote a brief example here.  This is from the time traveler’s battle against the Morlocks:

            …all was dark, and the Morlocks had their hands upon me. Flinging off their clinging fingers I hastily felt in my pocket for the match-box, and—it had gone! Then they gripped and closed with me again.  In a moment I knew what had happened. I had slept, and my fire had gone out, and the bitterness of death came over my soul. The forest seemed full of the smell of burning wood.  I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms, and pulled down.  It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous spider’s web. I was overpowered, and went down.  I felt little teeth nipping at my neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came against my iron lever.  It gave me strength.  I struggled up, shaking the human rats from me, and, holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces might be. I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free.  The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting came upon me.  I knew that both I and Weena were lost, but I determined to make the Morlocks pay for their meat. I stood with my back to a tree, swinging the iron bar before me.  The whole wood was full of the stir and cries of them. A minute passed. Their voices seemed to rise to a higher pitch of excitement, and their movements grew faster.  Yet none came within reach.  I stood glaring at the blackness…. (from Chapter 9).

            In addition to very readable prose, H.G. Wells also knows how to tease a mystery out very skillfully.  The time traveler arrives in the future at first thinking this is some sort of blissful human utopia, and only gradually does he realize the full horror of what is going on.  Small little hints are dropped little by little to gradually build the eeriness of the mystery.  Even though I already knew where this story was going, it was a delight to see the skillful building H.G. Wells was doing.  (Nowadays most people have already had the classics spoiled for them, but how this book must have thrilled its readers when it first came out in 1895!)

            “In the matter of sepulture, for instance, I could see no signs of crematoria now anything suggestive of tombs.  But it occurred to me that, possibly, there might be cemeteries (or crematoria) somewhere beyond the range of my explorings.  This, again, was a question I deliberately put to myself, and my curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point.  The thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark, which puzzled me still more: that aged and infirm among this people there were none.” (From Chapter 5)

            Considering this book was published back in 1895, it’s also incredibly imaginative.  Nowadays science fiction is a well-established genre, and bookshelves of any modern bookstore have rows and rows of post apocalyptic future books.  Science fiction writers of today can draw their inspiration from other science fiction writers.   But back in 1895, Wells must have been creating this whole idea out of nothing. 

            The world he creates is incredibly imaginative, as his hero travels around the ruined buildings of a lost future civilization, little guessing what horrors now lurk underground.

            The socialist themes in this book also provide some interesting food for thought.  (H.G. Wells was a die-hard socialist).  The theories of class struggle in this story had been left out of the children’s version I once read, but are very present in the original.  It’s not too heavy handed as to spoil the story, but it’s there.  And Wells’s version of the future—in which class divisions in the capitalist world become so large as to actually send humanity down two separate and divergent strains of evolution—seems just plausible enough to add some interest to the story.

            Conclusion: I’m happy to report this book was even better than I remembered it.

Other Notes

* I am tempted to add this book to my list of “All Time Greatest Books I’ve Ever Read.”  My only hesitation is that this book is so short that it feels almost like cheating to put it on an all time greatest books list.

* But I can definitely add this to my list of “Classic Books Which Are Actually Fun to Read”  

*Indeed, this book is so short, that publishers will often try to pad out the binding by inserting extra short stories by H.G. Wells.  (The edition I bought contains the H.G. Wells short story “A Dream of Armageddon”.) 

            The simplified version I had read as a child had also padded out the story as well.  In that version, the time traveler, after fleeing from the Morlocks, and seeing the strange crab creatures at the end of the world, had made one more stop with his time machine before finally returning to his present time.  In this last stop, he stops in the not too distant future—when human beings are more technologically advanced, but not yet evolved into another species.  He talks with future men about time travel, and they tell him that they’ve already had time machines in the future, but time machines had now been banned because too many of their bravest men disappeared in time machines and never came back.  Later, one of the men of the future tries to steal the time traveler’s machine from him (for the purposes of trying to go back in the past and live like a god) and there is a brief fight.

            All these years I assumed that this last episode was part of the official story, but it turns out that it’s not part of the original story at all.  Apparently the editors of the children’s version just threw it in for padding, but I’m not sure where it comes from. I’ve spent some time (more time than I care to admit actually) surfing the web to try to find the origin of that added episode, but without success.

            I know this is a long shot, but does this ring any bells for anyone out there?

* I have on my bookshelf a critical biography of H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells (A).  I’ve giving it a lot of thumbing through, but so far not read it properly.  (If I ever do read it properly, I’ll post a review on this blog like everything else I read.)

            For the moment, though, I’ll just say that this book has made me aware that there was a dark side to Wells’s legacy—anti-Semitism, for example.  But since I believe in separating the artist from the art, I don’t let all of H.G. Wells’s faults spoil my enjoyment of his novels.

Link of the Day 

Noam Chomsky "On Asian Americans"