Something to Hold On to: The Later Fiction

Abstract

Tono-Bungay represents Wells’s chief attempt to write a serious novel. Where Lewisham, Kipps and Polly operate in a more restricted world than does Wells as omniscient narrator, George Ponderevo, the central character of Tono-Bungay, tells his own story, wrestling with the same disorders that beset Wells. This gives the book a striking immediacy. As the narrator struggles to relive his experiences and come to terms with them, the reader’s imagination is engaged by the resourcefulness and energy with which this potentially overwhelming material is worked into shape. As the action becomes more recent, however, an element of incoherence in the narrator’s conclusions does start to obtrude. The book is honest to a fault, for Wells does not permit himself to switch between ideas and characters so evasively as previously, nor so readily pour irony over the sticking points.