Review: The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells (Classics Club Spin #21)

This book is on my Classics Club reading list and it came up on the Spin List (#5) this last time around. My heart most definitely did NOT leap up when I beheld this title come up for reading, but I decided to give it a whirl.

And let’s just say…. Low expectations are wonderful. You’re never disappointed, and frequently surprisingly pleased.

I would venture to say that most people (including me) have never heard of this book, so a little background is in order. The History of Mr. Polly is a comic novel published by H.G. Wells in 1910. It’s actually a late novel for him, coming after his more famous works. And the word “comic” is the tiniest bit misleading, for this is definitely not a slap-your-knee funny kind of book. But it is amusing in an often farcical kind of way. It’s also interesting because it’s supposed to be semi-autobiographical, based on Wells’ early years as a tradesman. So it’s definitely worth your time.

The novel opens in medias res, with Mr. Alfred Polly at a crisis point in his life. He’s middle-aged, fat and unhappy. He’s trapped in a loveless marriage and an unsuccessful business. So the first part of the novel is to merely show how he got to this point of desperation, and to be honest, the story is very slow to take off. I had to keep prodding myself to keep going with it and not give up prematurely.

But it did, in fact, take off eventually. Part of it is just getting used to Mr. Polly himself. He’s a dreamer, a little bit of a ne’er-do-well, and the type of person that gets into situations before he even knows what’s going on. A prime example of this is his marriage to Miriam, a cousin whom he doesn’t really love. In spite of this, he finds himself proposing to her before he knows what’s happening. And things don’t get any better after the wedding, as you might expect. To wit:

Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist’s entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes.

I gradually realized that Wells injects a great deal of humor via Mr. Polly’s view of the world. Likewise, Wells uses a kind of running gag throughout the book in Mr. Polly’s propensity for making up words or misusing words he thinks he knows:

A man whose brain devotes its hinterland to making odd phrases and nicknames out of ill-conceived words, whose conception of life is a lump of auriferous rock to which all the value is given by rare veins of unbusinesslike joy, who reads Boccaccio and Rabelais and Shakespeare with gusto, and uses “Stertoraneous Shover” and “Smart Junior” as terms of bitterest opprobrium, is not likely to make a great success under modern business conditions. Mr. Polly dreamt always of picturesque and mellow things, and had an instinctive hatred of the strenuous life. He would have resisted the spell of ex-President Roosevelt, or General Baden Powell, or Mr. Peter Keary, or the late Dr. Samuel Smiles, quite easily; and he loved Falstaff and Hudibras and coarse laughter, and the old England of Washington Irving and the memory of Charles the Second’s courtly days. His progress was necessarily slow. He did not get rises; he lost situations; there was something in his eye employers did not like; he would have lost his places oftener if he had not been at times an exceptionally brilliant salesman, rather carefully neat, and a slow but very fair window-dresser.

Things get worse and worse for Mr. Polly, until we find him in the circumstances with which the novel opens. And it’s here that he decides he will set fire to his shop and commit suicide at the same time. Of course, he bungles the whole thing horribly, but then his fortunes finally take a turn for the better, and he eventually experiences happiness and redemption (not in a sappy way, but in a completely genuine and compelling turn of events that leaves the reader highly satisfied).

The final word should be given to Mr. Polly:

I’ve never really planned my life or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It’s so with everyone.

I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Polly here, but it is the perfect summation of his approach to life, and the reason I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I’m glad I read it and would probably re-read it.

Just FYI, interestingly there have been a few movie and TV adaptations of the story, including one as recently as 2007. So I’m thinking that may be worth a look as well.

Review: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Popcorn and candy bars, or filet mignon -- which do you prefer?

Of course that’s something of a ridiculous question. If you’re like me, you love both, and they both are excellent treats, not meant for daily consumption. However, sometimes popcorn and candy bars make more sense, and junky food like that is what you want, and at other times filet mignon is what’s needed to make your soul complete.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from this sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (THT). It was a good read, and I raced through it, but it felt like eating popcorn and candy bars, whereas reading THT feels like eating filet mignon. The author, Margaret Atwood, is undoubtedly in a very different place now (along with the entire world) than when THT was written back in the 1980’s, and I have to imagine that has something to do with it, but The Testaments (TT) feels very direct and plot-driven, whereas THT was more poetic and ambiguous. Some of that may have to do with the story itself -- June’s story in THT was created under circumstances that leant themselves to hiding, ambiguity, and even poetry and lyricism, whereas the accounts of the three women in TT are much more direct, having been made either from a place of power, both known and secret (Aunt Lydia) or from a place of relief and retrospectiveness (Agnes and Nicole).

Hopefully this is not too much of a spoiler at this point (in case it is, you are warned now). TT consists of the “testimony” of three pivotal characters from the world of Gilead:

• Aunt Lydia, who it turns out, is a mole working against the power structure of Gilead by orchestrating the movement of information and refugees across the border into Canada;
• Agnes, formerly known as Hannah, who is June Osborne’s first daughter, and who reluctantly but surely is breaking away from the iron grip of Gilead’s society and norms; and
• Daisy, a young Canadian girl who eventually realizes that she is Baby Nicole, the long-lost pawn of the Gilead government in their media and propaganda attacks on Canada, who continues to be used as a pawn, but now by the resistance inside Gilead (being led, not incidentally, by Aunt Lydia).

Atwood beautifully begins the three stories as independent tales, but slowly begins to intertwine them in sometimes predictable but also surprising ways. Unlike THT, there is more of a real conclusion to the story in this book. It’s so definite that I would be tremendously surprised if there was a third book in this series. It also ends with another Gilead research symposium transcript as at the end of THT, which serves to flesh out even more of the ending of the story. However, I wonder if Atwood was being a little sneaky here -- did anyone else notice that these Gilead researchers were spending part of their time playing with Gileadean things, such as the Recreational Gilead Period Hymn Sing and the Period Costume Reenactment Day? It struck me as odd, and I have to wonder if this was Atwood’s way of warning us that even seemingly beneficial fascination with, and study of, historical periods can be like playing with fire, risking planting the seeds of repeating history. It just sounded too much like things like Civil War reenactors and all of that worship of the Civil War era, which is still very much with us.

Also, I was glad to see that Aunt Lydia really did have a soul in this book. We have gotten glimpses of that in the TV show, of course, but I always felt that there was more there, and TT gives some pretty satisfying answers to her motivation, although still on the popcorn level and not that of the filet mignon. The passages recounting the way in which Aunt Lydia became one of the founders of Gilead’s version of a convent were some of the most fascinating and satisfying in the whole book.

I think an interesting experiment now may be to reread both THT and TT in sequence. That might not be a good thing, because I don’t think Atwood really intended for that to be a thing, necessarily, but I’m just curious if the books would actually feel related in any way, or do you really need the TV show to fill in some of the mental gaps? Because I’ll be honest, while I was reading TT (and rereading THT a while back), images from the TV show irresistibly popped into my head while I was reading and colored it -- mostly in good ways, I think. But still. That’s a danger for a reader, and may be the source of the “popcorn” feeling with TT that I described earlier.

All in all, this book was well worth the read and I enjoyed it immensely.