H.G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon

I am not proud of the way that I came at this novel.  I wasn’t exactly reading to find faults, but I apparently wasn’t feeling especially generous either.  I was interested to see Wells do his magic, but several stories in the past had made me wary of a couple of unpleasant political leanings I had caught glimpses of.  “The Land of the Blind” particularly stuck with me like a splinter of wood beneath my fingernail.  The narrator of The Time Machine also sat uneasily with me.  So when The First Men in the Moon opened with a narrator running from his creditors, writing a play to make a quick buck, I was unenthused.  I read the majority of the novel with my shield in one hand and my sword in the other, as it were.

My edition, the Penguin Classics edition, first published in 2005, has an introduction by China Mieville.  I saved the introduction until after I had finished the book, to avoid potential spoilers.  On the one hand, this was a good move, because it was indeed full of spoilers.  On the other hand, I could have used Mieville’s insight and good sense while reading the novel!

Mieville’s introduction is thoughtful, well-researched, and invigorating.  If I were writing one of my usual analytical reviews, I would just want to quote everything Mieville says, because they are the things that I wish I had been thinking and seeing while I was reading.  Instead, I got a burst of information and analysis that cast the book in a new light, that let me look over the path I had followed and reinterpret it, more wisely now.

While reading, I kept looking to make sense of Bedford and Cavor as moral characters.  I don’t know why I did this—probably to get a glimpse behind the mask of who H.G. Wells was at this time in his life.  It is uncommon for a writer to make their main character a complete ass (uncommon but certainly not unheard of), and while the Wells novels and stories I have read certainly have flawed, limited, and human narrators, it did not occur to me that Bedford might be someone Wells disagreed with completely, someone he was mocking and expecting us to be in on the joke. I was appalled by much of his character, but I assumed that Wells was not, and that’s what I mean by reading with my sword and shield in hand.  I couldn’t interpret openly and honestly, enjoying what was there before me.  I was dancing around it as though in a duel.  It compromised both my enjoyment and my understanding.

Before reading the introduction, I would have told you the book, politically and philosophically, was a muddle and a mess.  But the more generous reading of that is to observe the beliefs that are in tension within the novel, to see what is at war in the very soul and imagination of the author.  What is rotten at the core of the Imperial and Industrial world of Britain, and how do you save it?  What does that look like?  How do we have the progress and quality of life experienced by some without the cost that such a life inflicts on many?  Wells is trying to work that all out while creating honest and living fiction.  In Mieville’s eyes, I see the book as something much more beautiful and searching than what I saw before.  And I am thankful for his guidance.