Last Books

I bought a book called The Last Books of H.G. Wells. Is it a big, fat omnibus volume? No, it's a very, very thin one- because H.G. Wells' last two books weren't really books at all but pamphlets.

I've read the first of them. It's called A Happy Turning. There's a war on (it's 1943) and during daylight hours Wells is giving his mind to the awfulness of the war but at night he's escaping into a happy Dreamland. There's lots of splendiferous architecture (I can relate to that) also bishops on broomsticks and crowds of friendly people to talk to- including Wells' own personal Jesus- an eager young revolutionary type who considers himself to be one of history's failures. Wells is 75 (I think)- three years older than I am now- and he's given up trying to please his public and is writing whatever he damn well feels like writing. There are visions and grumbles, there is wisdom and immaturity. He spends (wastes) a whole section cursing sycamore trees- and fills up a couple of pages reprinting the universal commination of Deuteronomy 28. Would it be unfair (unkind) to say there are whiffs of senility?

The second book (pamphlet) is Mind at the End of its Tether. This has a fearsome reputation and I've long wanted to get my hands on a copy. I'll probably read it later today...

Showdowns

Youtube keeps sending me clips of showdowns. They have been extracted from westerns and gangster movies. Obviously I must like showdowns.

But the more of them I watch the less patience I have with them- because they're all the same. There's always a swine who seems to have the upper hand and a hero who is the coolest head on the block. Witticisms are exchanged in an atmosphere of menace. And then talk becomes walk as our hero resolves the situation with either a devastating put-down or an even more devastating act of violence. It's drama by numbers. Cheap stuff.

And so very unlikely. Was there ever a real person who carried themselves like John Wayne (in almost anything) Clint Eastwood (as the man with No Name) Tom Hardy as a Kray or Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby? I doubt it. We're being sold an impossible vision of masculinity- and one that looks a lot like psychopathy...

Mind At The End Of Its Tether

H.G. Wells is dying. He believes that not only his life but all life- Life with a capital "L"- is coming to an end. He derives this belief from his understanding of evolutionary theory.

Mind at the End of its tether is a sad book. Wells was continually up and down- now Utopian, now Dystopian- and it's a pity that his last published work should have coincided with one of his depressive moods. For all the intellectual adventuring he'd done in between, he winds up in much the same place he found himself- fifty years before- when he sent his Time Traveller into the far future. It's also an incoherent book- very short- but not well constructed or well argued. And the science- now 80 years old- is materialist, fatalistic, Victorian, superseded...

I've been hearing about this book for as long as I've been interested in Wells. I had expected it to be something terrific- and it's not.