The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells - 22/1/4

 

The first book I finished this year is the novella The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. Heads up: this year I'm planning to knock out at least a couple of epic novels (War and Peace, Shogun, etc) so I wanted to balance that out with a decent number of novellas because I like variety- and to make sure I don't only read 2-3 books this year. This was a good one to start with, a classic sci-fi / horror story about a physicist named Griffin who turns himself invisible, and then (naturally) turns into a homicidal maniac. Since it's release 120+ years ago, this story has become a hallmark of the horror-scifi-thriller genre and is adapted with no small degree of frequency, most recently in 2020 with Elizabeth Moss (btw- one of the last movies I saw in theaters pre-pandemic, and pretty good!).

I enjoyed the novella quite a bit, especially the winding way in which the story unfolded. The reader is dumped into the middle of the action, and it's only in the back half that the villainous protagonist tells the story of how he became invisible in the first place. The homicidal mania feels a tiny bit unearned, but I did learn from the Wikipedia page that Wells was inspired by Plato's Republic, which contains this idea: if a man were made invisible and could act with impunity, he would "go about among men with the powers of a god." I do agree that the temptations of acting with impunity would turn most people immoral, but I'm not sure if I'm onboard with the full-blown murderous "reign of terror" that Griffin promises to unleash upon the world. Speaking of Wikipedia tidbits, I loved this bit in the "background" section: According to [academic] John Sutherland, Wells and his contemporaries such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling "essentially wrote boy's books for grown-ups." There seems to be a lot of handwringing about the infantilization of media (looking at you, superhero movies) nowadays, but it's funny to see those aforementioned titans of literature written about in the same semi-patronizing way. There's something to be said for a little bit of populism- it tends to help a story stand the test of time!