The Time Machine (Book Review)

As the new year approaches I hope that you've all had a terrific year and a joyous Christmas! Sorry I've been inactive for the last couple of weeks but I've been rather busy as of late around this time. But now we can return to normal and end the Old Year with a good old-fashioned book review. For Christmas this year I received some books, being a somewhat avid reader, amongst which were Lord of the Flies, the Nobel Prize-winning, 1954 dystopian schoolboy masterpiece, from William Golding; I-Robot, the progenitor hi-tech collection of stories upon which the very field of Robotics was founded by scientist Isaac Asimov and finally, the book that I will review today: The Time Machine. The 1895 tale from biologist H. G. Wells is seen alongside Jules Verne's 20000 Leagues Under the Sea as a definitive tale, that founded the genre of Science Fiction itself.

One of the three grandfathers of Science Fiction, Wells has constructed a classic scenario of the human condition and the political possibilities of how our race might develop, epitomised by the struggle endured by a tranquil surface race (the Eloi) at the enjoyment of their wretched subterranean brethren, the Morlocks, in the distant future held in store for us, in 802,701 AD.

The story is quite short at just under 100 pages, but contained within those pages is a sublime journey across the fourth dimension into contrasting worlds constructed so vividly, that one can reach out and touch it; you can live and breathe the very tale, which seldom happens in my opinion and even as I write this passage and think back to the penultimate chapter, I get shivers just thinking about the dying Earth visited in the year 13,000,000-odd AD, where a brackish sea and a frighteningly large, red sun greets our unnamed time-traveller. And I think back further and consider the year in which it was written, 1895, and try to imagine a probably science-illiterate public and their reaction to the story, with a hodgepodge of opinions flying like bullets as a new-fangled concept emerged; that of time-travel.

Wells' writing in this story is in past tense, with almost every paragraph contained in speech marks as the story follows the time-traveller's recollections of his time spent in the far future, explaining it to a group of incredulous people, most of whom are named by simple archetypes such as "the Editor," "the Psychologist," "the Journalist" etc. Even our time-traveller lacks a name, which is impressive given that he is no 'cookie-cutter' character and when others refer to him in speech, his name becomes simply "Mr. -" This idiosyncrasy is similar to the voice of the time-traveller himself, with the voice being -as one might expect- rather educated and 'old-fashioned', with explanations taking up -on occasion- more words than necessary, though this seems only to strengthen the character, demonstrating his knowledge as unusual Latin lone-words creep into explanations of nature, applied to the plant life for example, which is testament to the author's knowledge of biology, which serves only to make the read even more fascinating.

The ease of reading the novel is similar to Orwell's 1984 for me, with a similar tone of voice albeit tackling a very different topic, which made this even more enjoyable, with the ability to relieve, frighten and disgust the reader equally present in both Author's repertoires.

Suffice it to say, The Time Machine has been a great pleasure of a book, presenting a vivid world, a developed cast of characters and a surprisingly rich storyline that still to this day, is far from being 'primitive'. His almost prophetic prose and unsettling predictions is matched by a brilliant insight into Wells' Socialist politics and the political orthodoxy during which the book was written, rendering the quote from the New Statesman's 1895 review "H. G. Wells has written a clever book..." a painful understatement.

Penguin's 2012 Edition