Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells

The strange title refers to the snake oil panacea invented by our narrator’s uncle that leads to fame, fortune and, inevitably, ruin. The satirical depiction of the business can easily be applied to, say, the homeopathic industry, but much of it applies to capitalism in general. While this main thread is followed the vitality of the book remains, but the effect is diluted by numerous sidetracking episodes.

It was published in 1909, and offers a confounding political outlook. The overall vision often appears to be English conservative, and this is a little too late for the anti-semitism to be shrugged off, but then you are hit with a radical passage like this:

"Great God!" I cried, "but is this Life?"

For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste! So it struck me then, and for a time I could think of no other interpretation. This was Life! It came to me like a revelation, a revelation at once incredible and indisputable of the abysmal folly of our being.

I have a biography of Wells lined up for future reading, perhaps reading that will give me a better understanding of the political angle.