The Time Machine

 

After reading the collection of H.G. Wells’s short stories, I wanted to revisit a couple of his longer pieces.  I had read The Time Machine a while back, and I remember reading it quickly.  It was a short book, and I knew it was an adventure story, and I wanted it to move quickly, so I moved through it as such.  My other memory of reading the book last time is that my head was filled with what I already knew about the book, and those images and ideas covered the very words I was reading like a translucent layer of onion skin, allowing me to read but not to clearly see.

 

I have often said that the least wonderful part of any work of fiction is the plot.  What happens happens, and it’s interesting and even gripping, but it’s rarely the rich and rewarding part of any given reading experience.  You can get the plot from hundreds of sources on the internet (bound to be close to accurate), or from one of the many cinematic adaptations (bound to be wildly inaccurate in some places).  What is compelling, rather, is the language of the text.  What the author actually says and how they actually say it, that is the actual meat of any reading experience.  For me, at least.

 

For this read, I slowed down, and I didn’t worry about where the story was going.  The first two chapters have all the fun theory about time, and the scientific foundation for the wild tale.  These are gripping chapters, like short stories unto themselves.  In spite of the many characters gathered around the time traveler, the conversation is easy and fun to follow.  The richness really kicks in with chapter three. Wells possesses an unusual gift for bringing his imagined physical world to life.  Here’s his description of moving forward in time:

 

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensation of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.  As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling success of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

 

We are used to seeing movie magic today, used to someone turning a concept into a brilliant visual to amaze us.  Again and again I am stopped by Wells’s ability to do that same thing with words—and to do it in a time when no one had ever seen special effects in films.  He had to come up with those details himself and then paint the picture such that we could see it with him.  He applies his skills to moments of drama, like the movement through time, but also to the quiet descriptions of the landscapes of the future.

 

If you care about the plot and spoilers, I would stop reading here.

 

The plot itself is interesting and moves well.  Like most great classic plots, it moves forward with a simple, driving arc.  The narrator, stuck in the future because his time machine has been seized, needs to locate his machine and find a way to get it back.  He investigates, gathers resources, endures a few close calls, all of which educate him about his antagonists, makes a daring attempt for his machine and narrowly escapes danger.  In his desperation while fleeing he flies further into the future and comes as close as one can to the death of the planet before returning home.

 

The philosophical argument is not nearly as gripping as the writing or the plot.  There is a warning that the comfortable class is getting to comfortable and will become effeminized and infantilized until they are defenseless and little better than lambs.  The fate of the working class is not much better.  They maintain some ingenuity, but they become beastlike and not much better than predatory animals themselves.  There is a whiff of political concern about class division, but Wells’s sympathies are so clearly with the sad fate of the rich and well-off that I can’t even muster the interest or strength for any thorough analysis.  I’m sure many such analyses already exist out there.  There is also the stench of racism surrounding the Morlocks, but I didn’t see any need to prod into that either.

 

Even more problematic for me, on this read, are the parts of this sociological construction that don’t make any sense. The structures built to house the Eloi are, if not sophisticated, elegant and pretty.  We don’t see the Morlocks displaying any such interest in architecture beyond these homes.  Similarly, the narrator suggests that it’s the Morlocks who make the clothing for the Eloi, but again, we don’t see them displaying any other textile skills or interests.  And why both to clothe and elegantly house the Eloi instead of creating a simple pen in which they could sleep.  The narrator suggests that the houses give them some genuine protection from the Morlocks, but why would the Morlock’s do that, instead of building a structure that allows them easy access without traumatizing their livestock.  As easy as it was for me to see and feel the physicality of Well’s world, it was difficult to swallow the social structures existing within the physical ones.

 

All in all, I enjoyed the book less than I expected, mostly because of the political and social beliefs (or lack of beliefs) that failed as tentpoles to hold everything aloft.