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The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells by Michael
Coren, Bloomsbury, pp 240, £20

Twenty years ago, you could talk about H. G. Wells without having to
describe what the writer achieved during his lifetime. Today, as he sinks
into history, all that remains is the occasional reference to his better
known works of science fiction, or ‘scientific romances’, as he labelled
them.

The Invisible Man recently resurfaced as a play. Apart from this work,
The Time Machine, War of the Worlds and First Men On the Moon, few of the
150 other books, pamphlets and other publications that Wells wrote are read
today. From time to time, someone will comment on his prescience in forecasting
the dreadful effects of nuclear weapons in The World Set Free, which, says
Michael Coren, shows that ‘Wells clearly understood the potential, and reality,
of nuclear capability quite brilliantly’. The book, though, remains out
of print.

One or two of Wells’s ‘social’ novels lurch back into print from time
to time, most notably The History of Mr Polly and Kipps. But his ‘philosophical’
and political works, or any of his fiction written much after 1910, remain
all but forgotten and unread.

That being so, why should someone come in and try to bash the old boy’s
reputation to pieces? Or, as Michael Coren would see it, put the record
straight. What record? What reputation?

Coren tells us: ‘Conventional literary and political history depicts
H. G. Wells as being unerringly on the side of the angels.’ In his prelude,
Coren says it ‘is my belief that Wells’ influence on his own age, and his
legacy to those ages to come, were, taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive.’
Coren is unconvincing. His argument seems to rest on just half a dozen pages.

The first half of The Invisible Man is a concise but reasonably complete
history of a man who escaped a lower middle class, or upper working class,
fate. The sort of person who might all too easily have ended up as a clerk
in an insurance company or as the draper’s assistant of Wells’s early days,
a ‘profession’ he used more than once in his own fiction. Wells survived
this fate thanks to a dedicated teacher, and to a scholarship, won in an
age when governments saw education as a way out of poverty and unemployment,
that took him to what was to become Imperial College.

As Wells himself described his origins: ‘Wells was the son of a bankrupt
father, a gardener and professional bowler who had taken to business and
failed, and of a mother who consequently had to return to the domestic service
in which she had begun her career after the bankruptcy of her father .
. .’

Wells became ‘one of the most prolific of the ‘literary hacks’ ‘ of
his time, as he put it in 1943, in his own ‘auto-obituary’. Apart from a
severe case of self-importance, Wells’s biggest crime seems to have been
to mistreat his wife and some of his girlfriends, an area of the author’s
life that has been aired many times before. Today such behaviour might lose
him his job as a cabinet minister but in a writer it would go unremarked,
if not condoned. It was hardly a punishable offence, even in the first quarter
of the 20th century.

Wells was at his best when he turned to science, either in search of
ideas for his fiction, or in his analysis of how science could influence
society. Coren rarely gets around to this aspect of Wells, apart from the
remarks on nuclear power and the strange episode of Hilaire Belloc, fighting
back against the inexorable rise of evolution by attempting to shoot down
Wells’s treatment of the topic in The Outline of History.

Wells described this book as ‘an attempt to tell, truly and clearly,
in one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind so far
as it is known today’. A runaway success, the fat book sold two million
copies in 15 years, which explains why it crops up so often in second hand
bookshops. Belloc did not like its espousal of evolution. Coren presents
this argument, and other disputes that engaged Wells’s attention, as a clash
of two literary titans. In reality it was a battle, albeit it a significant
skirmish, in a war over modern biology and its implications for religion.

Apart from his attacks on Wells, which, as in the case of the author’s
alleged antisemitism, Coren builds on scraps of evidence, all but ignoring
the vast body of the author’s work, much of which is described in some detail
but without much critical insight, this biography unearths little new material.
It is not, though, a rehash of past material. Coren has put in plenty of
research, although some is through suspect devices such as interviews with
known haters of Wells and his works.

Coren reinvents Wells through modern eyes. He makes far too little attempt
to interpret his evidence against Wells in the light of the time when it
was current. For example, antisemitism, which Coren has to work hard to
heap upon Wells in the half-a-dozen pages that seem to be the justification
for the biography’s excoriation of the author, was all too common when
he was writing. The fact that Wells was less than perfect hardly makes his
influence ‘pernicious and destructive’.

In focusing on people and Wells’s alleged personality faults and ignoring
most of his ideas, Coren falls in with most earlier biographers. In particular,
few have bothered to consider the writer’s use of science, or his influence,
if any, on the area. And yet throughout his life Wells insisted, perhaps
stretching a point, that he was a scientist.

It would be silly to berate Coren for the book that he did not write.
This is a no-frills biography that also offers a chance to find out a bit
about the work of Wells without having to go through the chore of reading
it.

Perhaps 1996, when copyright finally lapses on the work of H. G. Wells,
might be an appropriate time for something more gratifying that the sight
of publishers rushing to make a quick buck. Perhaps someone will write a
reasoned assessment of this jumped-up scientist’s role in making his subject
a fashionable topic for the chattering classes of his day.

Michael Kenward is a science writer.

* * *

The Invisible Man, Pan Books, pp 102, £3.99 pbk

The Time Machine, Everymans Library/Dent, pp 116 , £2.50/Pan,
pp 128, £3.99

War of the Worlds, Pan, pp 192, £3.99