The Time Machine

At just 88 pages The Time Machine is by far the shortest book I’ve written about here so far.  The book itself is the last HG Wells one I had left on the list and it wasn’t half as enjoyable as my previous reads of his.  As with any of the books I haven’t enjoyed, there are good bits to it.  In fact, it starts incredibly well.  My issue is with pretty much everything that happens once the Time Traveller takes over the narrative.  Accordingly, it picks up again once he shuts up.  And I think I know what my problem is with the story.

For those who don’t know the bare bones of the tale, The Time Machine is about a man who travels forward in time to the year 802,701 AD and his brief adventures there.  After presenting a lecture a never name man jets off in his machine to a world of innocent Eloi and industrious Morlocks.  For some reason the Morlocks are the bad guys, even though they’ve been driven underground and their toil allows the Eloi to spend their days doing nothing.  In Wells’ defence, the Eloi are shown to be completely useless and just sit around eating fruit all day, but the Morlocks are actively trying to make things worse for the Time Traveller by stealing his machine.  It’s a nice little allegory for class divide, really; it’s just a shame that the Morlocks are treated with such contempt whereas the Eloi (a sign that the dream of human intellect had “committed suicide,”) are only to be pitied.  After that there’s a bit about the end of the world, but that’s not really important.

As I said earlier, despite the fact that I didn’t enjoy the book much, there are bits of it that are very clever.  Very few characters are named and even those who are have names like Blank or Dash.  The book opens with a scientific lecture and debate and so I initially assumed this so the novella could engage in a shorthand fashion with its contemporary theories.  It’s much simpler to represent a school of thought through the Medical Man or the Provincial Mayor, for example, than to flesh out characters that could hold similar views and this works marvellously at first.  The problem comes when Well propels us into the future.  We are already distanced from our protagonist as we don’t know who he is, when he’s place so far into an unrecognisable future it’s so difficult to connect with him or care much about his narrative.  Even the introduction of a named Eloi, Weena is not enough.  By the point she is named, my interest had waned into apathy.

The ending of the book annoyed me too.  I can’t make up my mind if I liked it or not.  The Time Traveller arrives back in his own time and tells the story to his friends, many of whom (unsurprisingly) call bullshit.  And there’s part of me that wants the story to end like this- with the mystery of whether it is all an elaborate lie or not.  The mystery is resolved and a new once replaces it, though.  One of the Time Traveller’s friends sees him disappear in his machine, never to be heard of again.  What we’re left with is supposition as to where and when he could have gone and why he doesn’t return.  Personally, my money’s on gruesome death, but that’s not an option Wells presents.

I don’t really know what to say about the book in closing.  It’s short and clearly the work of an inexperienced writer.  I loathe to write it off as it has been such a genre changing book.  In this story, Wells invented the time machine.  It’s such an undeniably important book.  Without it the sci-fi genre and our pop culture landscape would be completely different.  If only he’d been a bit nicer about those Morlocks.

I’m now reading Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.  It’s a real page turner, so shouldn’t be too long.