Dave's Book Blog: "The Invisible Man" by H G Wells

Tuesday 1 August 2023

"The Invisible Man" by H G Wells

A strange guest arrives at an inn in Iping and takes a room. He always appears in a hat and coat; his face is hidden by heavy glasses and bandages. Glimpse by glimpse, the villagers begin to suspect that something is wrong; eventually they realise that, though his clothes can be seen, his body is invisible. He flees from the village and arrives, by chance, at the house of an old acquaintance, now a doctor. Here he seeks help and tells his back story. But his experiences, and his determined and ruthless personality, have made him angry. Now he decides (like a rather stereotypical 'mad scientist' turned megalomaniac) that he will institute a reign of terror over the surrounding countryside. All he needs is an accomplice.

The brilliance of the book is the way the story is so matter of fact. This might be science fiction but everything is utterly realistic (except the invisibility). The chapters are written as if to accumulate evidence for an inquiry. The descriptions are detailed. The setting is really real: Iping is a real village near Midhurst, in Sussex where Wells as a young man was apprenticed to a chemist. The villagers sound like real Sussexers. The 'scientific' explanation of invisibility, when it comes (and Wells knew that this should be left until quite late in the story) is a mixture of real science (refraction etc) and quasi science with the brilliant addition of a mention of Roentgen who announced his discovery of X-rays (which can see through flesh, making it, as it were, invisible) less than two years before The Invisible Man was published. The style is so utterly mundane that all these truths and facts drown out one's whispers of disbelief about invisibility itself (the fundamental problem is that if a man was invisible he couldn't absorb light on his retinas and therefore he couldn't see, he would be blind).

And there are so many little details that render it utterly matter-of-fact. He stumbles going down the stairs because he can't see his feet. He makes footprints. He can be heard, and smelt by dogs. People bump into him and jostle him because they can't see him. And he has to be naked which, in January, in the snow, is not very practicable. Nor can he eat whilst being watched because the food can be seen inside him (presumably as a squalid mush) until he assimilates it.

This is the textbook way of how to write scifi: make everything else so utterly convincing that the fantasy becomes believable.

And it's great fun to read.

Selected quotes:

"the stranger was undoubtedly an unusually strange sort of stranger" (Ch 2)
"So it was that on the ninth day of February, at the beginning of the thaw, this singular person fell out of infinity into Iping Village." (Ch 3)
"His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers." (Ch 4)
"The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action." (Ch 6)
"it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?" (Ch 7)
"Jaffers clutched at it, and only helped to pull it off; he was struck in the mouth out of the air, and incontinently drew his truncheon and smote Teddy Henfrey savagely upon the crown of his head." (Ch 7)
"It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man." (Ch 8)
"Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations." (Ch 10)
"It was strange to see him smoking; his mouth and throat, pharynx and nares, became visible as a sort of whirling smoke cast." (Ch 17)
"Paper, for instance, is made up of transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper, fill up the interstices between the particles with oil so that there is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton fibres, linen fibres, wool fibres, woody fibres, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue. So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water." (Ch 19)
"the place that had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town." (Ch 20)
"In going downstairs the first time I found an unexpected difficulty because I could not see my feet" (Ch 21)
"Robbing! Confound it! You’ll call me a thief next! Surely, Kemp, you’re not fool enough to dance on the old strings. Can’t you see my position?" (Ch 23)
"The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realized what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was, – in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded, civilized city." (Ch 23)
"I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition – what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there?" (Ch 23)
"that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes – no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways – scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend the disobedient." (Ch 24)