"The Invisible Man" by Herbert George Wells (1897)

 

I am actually reading more now than during the whole year - it helps that I have a new, handy E-reader + instead of countless podcasts, I started listening to audiobooks. Since my Goodreads 2023 reading challenge is over, I might even double up the challenge for the next year - by combining one audio + one paper book per month, I don't think that would be difficult? With Jules Verne still buzzing in my head, I kind of promised myself to finally read "The Invisible Man" by my old friend Herbert George Wells - it is one of his most famous novels and thanks to countless adaptations, until now I never got around to actually read it myself. 

"The Invisible Man" starts with the arrival of a mysterious stranger in a quaint, sleepy little village of Iping (that deserves to be visited simply because of this literary connection) where his solitude and insistent reclusiveness provokes extreme curiosity of quirky locals who eventually become completely hysterical and even violent towards him. The first half of the novel we don't know much about the main character and its mostly fascinating as a study of mob against an individual - the more our unnamed antihero demands to be left alone, the more locals knock at his door. His night walks are ridiculed and everybody noticed he is not going to a church. Basically he is an outsider, therefore dangerous. Up to this point I even had certain fondness for him - but in the second part of the book we find out more about him and author makes sure that he describes him as a sociopathic monster (nowadays he would probably be a mass shooter) so reader can't sympathise with him anymore. It is quite gripping and I must admit that Wells is much, much better storyteller than Verne who might be charmingly nerdy but is often lost in technical details. 

Even though the author did all he could to make the main character an antagonist and sociopath, I could not shake off the feeling that allegedly dangerous antihero is somehow less dangerous than ordinary people around him - under the surface, they are all extremely selfish, greedy and violent. There is even a scene where one character (Dr. Kemp) is running and knocking at his neighbour's door, just to get them slammed in his face. Wells is very insistent about antihero being dangerous lunatic who lost his mind and became a menace to society, but this is not a nice, warm society - the mob itself is far more menacing than The Invisible Man.