The main character of the novel is Griffin, an invisible man, a brilliant scientist who made an amazing discovery, but did not present it to the scientific council, because he was afraid that his invention would be appropriated by a less talented inventor like him. The Invisible Man commits many crimes, he hates people and wants to control them. In the chase, he meets poor Mr. Marvel, whom he is forced to help him. As a result, the poor guy can’t stand it and turns him over to the police. The invisible man is killed and he becomes visible.
The novel teaches that one should not interfere with nature, otherwise it can lead to irreversible consequences.
The action of the novel takes place in the “Coachman and Horses” tavern. In this place, in the bitter cold, out of nowhere, a strange stranger appears. This is a rare occurrence for this time of year. The owners, Mrs. Hall and her husband, are happy about their guest, but this happiness does not last long. People around you begin to notice the stranger's unusual behavior. He is wrapped from head to toe and covers his mouth when he eats food. Nobody knows what the guest does. There are constant curse words and the noise of breaking dishes coming from the room, and it smells of chemicals. Apparently, something isn’t working out for Griffin, the stranger’s name.
The hero wants to return to his previous appearance, but it doesn’t work out for him, so he gets very angry. Griffin ran out of money and, taking advantage of his fortune, decided to rob.
The scientist gradually loses his mind. By himself, he is an unrestrained, irritable person, which is clearly visible in the last period of his life. Griffin commits a rash act. In front of a large audience, he takes off his disguise and appears before everyone as a man without a head, and then disappears completely. For the first time, the Invisible Man managed to elude law enforcement agencies. During the chase, Griffin comes across poor Mr. Marvel, who was wearing a black shabby top hat and admiring his shoes.
While the tramp was trying on his shoes, he heard a voice from the void. Mr. Marvel liked to drink alcoholic beverages and therefore did not even pay attention to it at first. But an unknown voice explained to him that he saw the same unfortunate person as himself and decided to ask him for help. First of all, the Invisible Man asked to find clothes and money. At first, Mr. Marvel clearly did everything that the hero entrusted to him, since Griffin still had not lost his tyrannical behavior and could be very dangerous. In Aiping, careful preparations are underway for the celebration. The Invisible Man causes complete destruction there, taking away his personal belongings. Marver wants to escape from the tyrant, but he doesn’t succeed. He repeatedly tried to tell the police everything, but a voice from the void stopped him. Marvel understood perfectly well what this meant for him. But he was not going to just remain silent forever.
One day, the talented Dr. Kemp sat at home and did scientific work. And suddenly he saw a man running in a black top hat with a bunch of books. The stranger was hiding in the Jolly Cricketers tavern. Then he headed to the nearest police station.
Kemp heard the doorbell ring, but no one came. The doctor thought that local boys were frolicking, but saw blood stains on the carpet and crumpled bed linen. Suddenly Kemp heard an invisible voice. Griffin recognized his classmate.
The Invisible Man decided to take revenge on Mr. Marvel, but he could not get into the tavern. The city had long known about the Invisible Man, all the newspapers wrote about him. One visitor had a pistol in his hands and used it to wound Griffin in the arm. He came to Kemp.
Griffin told a classmate how he got to this point.
Griffin is an outstanding scientist, but he was unable to realize himself in scientific activity. He was a specialist in medicine and exact sciences. The hero knew perfectly well what was going on in the scientific department and therefore was afraid that his brilliant discoveries would be appropriated by another scientist who was not as talented as him. He began to live in a small London house and study science. Everything was fine until he ran out of money. Griffin steals his father's savings. The latter commits suicide. The hero does not regret anything, he is completely immersed in his discovery. The day Griffin has been waiting for so long is coming. He feels like his body is on fire and he feels sick.
When the owners enter the house, they do not find the guest. Griffin sets the house on fire, completely destroying the records of his discovery.
The hero hates all people. The Invisible Man wants to subjugate all of humanity and invites Kemp to cooperate with him. The latter realizes that he is talking to an abnormal fanatic. He turns to the police to Colonel Adlai. At first, the Invisible Man does not want anything to do with the colonel, but in the end he kills him.
There is a full hunt for the Invisible Man. He was caught. Now a beautiful, wounded man appeared before the people. Griffin was invisible when alive, but when dead he became visible.
Mr. Marvel used the money he took from the Invisible Man to buy clothes, a tavern, and began to live happily.
“The Invisible Man” by Wells, a brief description of the book is presented in this article.
This novel describes the fate of the English physicist Griffin, who invented a machine that makes a person invisible (and, at the same time, a drug that bleaches blood). True, for complete invisibility a person had to be an albino, which Griffin was. Griffin did not want to make his discovery public ahead of time in order to create a greater sensation later. However, circumstances were such that due to financial difficulties he could not continue his work. He came up with the idea of "disappearing" and starting a completely new life as an invisible man.
Griffin went invisible and set fire to the house where he lived to cover his tracks. At first he felt like “a sighted man in a city of the blind.” However, it soon turned out that his position was not so enviable. He could not make his food and clothing invisible, so he had to walk naked and suffer from the cold, and take food very rarely and secretly from other people. He also could not announce himself, because he was afraid that he would lose his freedom and would be shown in a cage.
All this forced him to find himself in the position of an outcast, avoiding human society. Griffin settled in the village of Aiping and began to work to regain his usual “visible” appearance. However, after some time he ran out of money and had to hide again.
Griffin turned for support to a scientist named Kemp, with whom he once studied. Griffin proposed starting a campaign of terror and intimidation of people, the ultimate goal of which would be to seize power. But Kemp refused to cooperate with the invisible man and called the police. Then the invisible man sentenced Kemp to death and began to hunt for him, but ultimately this led to the death of Griffin. He was captured and killed by an angry mob. After death, his body became visible again. The secret of invisibility was never restored, since Griffin destroyed his car, and his notes were stolen by the tramp Thomas Marvel, whom Griffin used as an assistant (Marvel naively hoped to unravel the secret on his own and become invisible).
"He was a man whose word was a ray of light in a thousand dark corners. From the very beginning of the century, wherever young men and women wanted to be freed from mental squalor, prejudice, ignorance, cruelty and fear, Wells was their side, tireless, eager to inspire and teach..."
So said John Boynton Priestley, an English writer of the younger generation, in 1946, speaking at Wells' funeral. Indeed, Wells devoted his life to helping people “free themselves from mental squalor, prejudice, ignorance, cruelty and fear.” The 18th century enlighteners Voltaire, Diderot, and Swift dreamed of the same thing, and by the time of the French Revolution of 1789 it seemed that they had accomplished their task. ( This material will help you write competently on the topic of Biography of H.G. Wells The Invisible Man. A summary does not make it possible to understand the full meaning of the work, so this material will be useful for a deep understanding of the work of writers and poets, as well as their novels, novellas, short stories, plays, and poems.) But bourgeois society gave rise to new cruelties, fears and prejudices. And this meant that new enlighteners had to come. Wells was among them - among the main ones.
The wonderful thing about Wells was that he could talk about things that mattered to millions of people. At the same time, he not only answered their questions, but also helped them pose these questions, in other words, to see and understand many of the problems of their own life.
To do this, it was necessary not only to know well how the world lives today. It was even more necessary to know the people you were talking to. Wells knew them well because he was one of them. He understood their fates, their worries through his own.
Wells belonged to that layer of society that truly emerged as a mass phenomenon only in the eighties and nineties of the last century - the democratic intelligentsia. People who earned their living by mental labor henceforth came not from among the clergy and nobility, but from those circles that had previously, especially when it came to literature and art, not been taken into account: from small shopkeepers, master's servants, low-ranking military men ranks, sometimes even from artisans. Of course, such an origin was optional. But from now on it was they who set the tone. Connected by a thousand threads with their old environment and at the same time rising above it, striving for success and at the same time still quite aware of their responsibility to those on whose behalf they spoke, these people determined a lot in the spiritual life of Europe. Did they all have the same views? Of course not. But they all, or almost all, agreed on one thing: a lot needs to change in the world. They saw their task not in developing the old for the thousandth time, but in discovering something new. They carried in their souls a premonition of some unprecedented change. What will it be like? When will it happen? Who knows! But we probably won't have to wait long. And we need to bring this change closer - to shake the old, hateful things, to show the injustice of life. These new newcomers could not be called traditionalists. They knew the other side of the “good old traditions.”
H.G. Wells knew her even better than others. His parents were from the “master's servants”, who constituted almost a separate class in England in the 19th century - with their own beliefs and prejudices, their own table of ranks, their pride and a carefully suppressed sense of social inferiority. It was the latter, apparently, that forced Sarah and Joseph Wells, as soon as they got married, to seek an independent position in society. It was soon found - in the form of a china shop in small, provincial Bromley. There was a figure of Atlas in the window, and the house was called Atlas House. Bromley Atlas, however, did not have to carry too much of a burden on his shoulders: the shop was pathetic, the house was shabby. And, worst of all, the store brought in almost no income. The family was poor. They didn't eat enough, their clothes were darned and over-darned. But they taught the children, they hoped to bring them into the people - for example, into the manufacturing trade. Of course, they didn’t aim for more.
Once it attracted him to itself, biology determined many aspects of his thinking for the rest of his life. He was especially grateful for this to zoology, which he directly studied with Huxley. “The study of zoology at that time,” he later wrote, “consisted of a system of subtle, rigorous and amazingly significant experiments. These were searches for and understanding of fundamental facts. The year that I spent as an apprentice with Huxley gave more to my education than any another year of my life. He developed in me a desire for consistency and for the search for mutual connections between things, as well as a rejection of those random assumptions and unfounded statements that constitute the main sign of the thinking of an uneducated person, as opposed to an educated one."
Wells did not abandon biology. In 1930, he, together with his son, a prominent biologist, later an academician, and the grandson of his teacher Julian Huxley, who by that time had become one of the luminaries of scientific London, published the book “The Science of Life,” which was a popular, but very serious and complete course of this science. Already a very middle-aged man, he defended his doctoral dissertation in biology. And yet literature won in this competition.
Already in his second year at the university, Wells was more engaged in literature than science. In the third year he was already one of the worst students; he did not pass the final year exams and received his diploma only many years later. But he wrote several stories and started a novel.
This story was called "The Argonauts of Chronos". When Wells, having become an experienced and recognized writer, later read it, he did not like it so much that he bought and burned the entire unsold edition of the magazine in which it was published. Finding it later turned out to be difficult, and it was reprinted only in 1961, fifteen years after Wells’ death. And then it became clear what ingratitude the writer showed towards his early brainchild - after all, all of Wells came from The Argonauts of Chronos.
Of course, when he spoke unkindly about “The Argonauts,” he was right in his own way: the title was pretentious, the plot was awkward, and the characters were somehow unnatural. But Wells very soon realized how bad it all was, and rushed to redo his story. When he changed the name, it became "Time Machine". He began to write new versions of it one after another, and situations and images arose from which then grew “War of the Worlds,” “When the Sleeper Awake,” “The First Men on the Moon,” and partly “The Invisible Man.” In the final version, he discarded these layers. It was necessary to free the plot from everything superfluous that led to the side. But then he had somewhere to get material for new novels, which rained down on the reader as if from a cornucopia.
Wells's rise was triumphant. “The Time Machine” was still in print, and already there were rave reviews for it. In the same month that the magazine publication ended, in May 1895, it was published as a separate edition in England and the USA simultaneously. The book made an even greater impression than the magazine publication. It was read avidly, the author was called a genius. Courage and reluctance to please established public opinions, expressive, energetic style, unusual manner, vivid imagination - this is an incomplete list of the advantages discovered by critics in Wells after the release of his first novel.
Subsequently, Wells did not speak very favorably of The Time Machine. He found many shortcomings in her. But, perhaps, it was the well-meaning critics who were right, not him. The time machine invented by Wells turned out to be one of the beginnings of a new science fiction. The range of its flight, the ability to cover distances of thousands of centuries, made it possible to pose problems of enormous significance and cover hundreds of millennia with its gaze. Thanks to it, literature acquired the ability to think on almost the same time scales in which biology, rediscovered by Darwin, thought. It is not for nothing that subsequent science fiction latched on to this idea. There are now dozens of “technical” versions of the time machine; there are hundreds, and maybe thousands, of stories and novels where this “type of transport” is used. Is this what gave rise to Wells's dissatisfaction with his novel? He missed so many opportunities! But was it possible for one person to accomplish all this?
In one respect, however, Wells was right. There is a certain dryness to The Time Machine. The scope of the author's thinking is unusually large, but all this is presented somewhat briefly. Who, if not the author, noticed this? And, as always, dissatisfaction with oneself brought good results. In subsequent novels, he tried, without losing the broad issues of “The Time Machine,” to be as specific as possible in everything, to make everything live through everyday life, and to deal more with the psychology of his characters.
His greatest success along this path was The Invisible Man (1897).
At first, the fate of this novel was not very happy. Criticism did not understand either the thoughts contained in it or its artistic merits. The very idea of describing the adventures of an invisible man seemed banal. Haven’t invisible people already appeared in dozens of fairy tales? Was this to be expected from a writer who amazed everyone with his scientific invention? Justice, however, soon triumphed. The Invisible Man immediately fell in love with the public, and critics had to reconsider their positions.
In addition, fellow writers received Wells's new novel with enthusiasm. This is what Joseph Conrad, one of the most popular writers of that time, wrote about him, for example: “Believe me, your things always make a strong impression on me. Strongest - you can’t find another word, believe me, a realist of fiction... If you want to know, What amazes me most is your ability to introduce the human into the impossible and at the same time degrade (or raise?) the impossible to the human, to its flesh, blood, sadness and stupidity. That's luck! In this little book you achieved your goal with amazing completeness. I won't talk about how fortunately you found the plot. This should be clear even to you. The three of us (I have two friends visiting me now) read the book and followed with admiration the cunning logic of your narrative. It was done masterfully, ironically, ruthlessly and very true." “Wells’ strength lies in the fact that he is not only a scientist, but also a most talented researcher of human character, especially unusual character,” wrote another major novelist, Arnold Bennett, about “The Invisible Man.” “He will not only skillfully describe to you a scientific miracle, but also will make it happen in some remote village. He will attack you from the front and rear until you completely submit to his magical spell."
It was a turning point. Until then, Wells was often spoken of as a scientist who could write. Now they started talking about him as a writer who knows how to think. This change in attitude towards Wells was so thorough that he was later even reproached more than once for certain deviations from strict scientific truth.
Such accusations are unfair. Science fiction by its nature is associated with what is commonly called “incomplete knowledge.” When we know everything about a particular subject (or rather, almost everything, since it is impossible to know everything), there is nothing to fantasize about. Wells had a lot to say. He always preferred plots that would lead to areas of knowledge that were not sufficiently developed. But within the given limits, I sought the greatest measure of reliability that was possible.
The same was the case with The Invisible Man. The fact that Wells chose a plot more than once used in fairy tales, of course, made his task more difficult. But he showed how to deal with it.
He, however, had a predecessor in this sense - the American romantic writer Fitz-James O'Bryan. O'Bryan has a story “Who Was It?” (1859), which tells about a mysterious invisible creature that attacks everyone who moves into “his” house. The hero of the story, however, manages to overcome him, and he and his friend, the doctor, try to figure out the secret of his invisibility. These explanations are purely scientific, and in many ways they foreshadow those that Wells will later give in The Invisible Man. However, Wells did it much better.
Over the course of several pages, he argues that if the refractive index of the sun's rays in the human body were equal to that of air, man would become invisible. He proves it by citing everyday, convincing, scientifically indisputable examples. True, he notes, one can object to this that a person is opaque, but this is true only from an everyday, and not from a scientific point of view, since the human body consists mainly of transparent, colorless tissues.
Only after this does the popularizer give way to the science fiction writer, but neither the intonation nor the manner of presentation changes, and the reader believes the fiction just as readily as he just believed the scientific truth. This time we are talking about how to practically achieve invisibility and what technical means should be used for this. After drinking several specially formulated potions, says Griffin, Wells's hero, who managed to achieve invisibility, he exposed himself to the rays emitted by the apparatus he built. What kind of rays these were, what the apparatus was, the reader, of course, will never know, but he believes the writer, because all the details of the experiment are presented very reliably. After Griffin conducted the first experiment, making the cat invisible, she retained the iridescent substance on the back of her eye. After the transformation, Griffin himself, “approaching the mirror... saw an emptiness in which one could barely discern vague traces of pigment on the retina of the eyes.”
Wells was then twice accused of serious scientific blunders by Bennett in the aforementioned review of The Invisible Man and by our famous popularizer of science Ya. Perelman in Entertaining Physics. The invisible man would be blind, they said. The accusation was unfair. By providing that Griffin's eyes were not fully transparent, Wells prevented him from going blind. True, then he forgot about it and, reading “Entertaining Physics,” decided that he had actually made a big mistake. Having met Ya. Perelman on August 1, 1934 in Leningrad, he apologized to him for her. As an attentive reader can see, this is completely in vain.
Wells explains equally thoroughly why the eye retained its pigmentation. It turns out that everything can be made invisible except pigment. If Griffin managed to turn himself invisible at all, it was only because he was an albino.
These kinds of disclaimers mean a lot in The Invisible Man. They serve to make the story compelling. Everything is available to a wizard, but a scientist acts within given limits. He is constantly forced to separate the feasible from the impossible. Therefore, by talking about the limitations of Griffin's capabilities, Wells, in fact, makes us believe more firmly in the scientific validity of his experiment. The former fairy tale somehow imperceptibly and very naturally becomes science fiction.
The authenticity of The Invisible Man is extraordinary. Everything here is visual and tangible. And this makes it especially interesting. Together with the tramp Marvel, we examine the shoes donated to him with the attention with which we, perhaps, have never examined our own. Why be surprised - after all, this is the main accessory of his, so to speak, “working clothing”! With no less surprise than the heroes themselves, we suddenly notice a glass hanging in the air and a revolver moving towards a house besieged by an invisible person. We watch Griffin smoke, and for us, as in an anatomy lesson, his nasopharynx is indicated. It turns out to be extremely interesting for us how a person takes off his shirt, since nothing distracts our attention - it is removed from an invisible body. At each of these moments we see one thing - a glass, a revolver, the bizarre curves of tobacco smoke, a shirt. And so it is in everything. Subsequently, when English cinematography was created, Wells took a prominent place in this new art form. But film techniques can be found in him long before he first watched the first film in his life. First of all, the technique that filmmakers call “close-up”. In "The Invisible Man" this technique was especially needed. The fantastic is proven here through the real. Through the emphatically real. “In H.G. Wells, seeing is believing, but here we believe even in the invisible,” one English critic remarked about “The Invisible Man.”
Is this a fairy tale or a good realistic story?
In any case, the fantastic premise is developed through completely realistic means. Everything that is needed is shown here, everything that is possible is proven.
No, we would be in vain to look in “The Invisible Man” for some kind of secret villain who whispered something in Griffin’s ear. There is no such character in this novel by Wells or in any other he wrote. Still, Griffin is not speaking on his own behalf. Not even on behalf of any of his friends. He is a complete individualist, and he has no friends. Paradoxically, he speaks on behalf of those he hates.
The city of Iping is not on the map, nor is the city where Griffin began his experiments. And at the same time, anyone could easily see them. To do this, it was enough to visit any of the provincial English towns. At least like Bromley.
Here there would be an exact same tavern, even if its name was not “Coachman and Horses”, a very similar hostess and a pastor, a pharmacist and other inhabitants, just like the spitting image. These people are all good-natured, unpretentious, and if anything causes their noisy protest, then these are things that would offend anyone in exactly the same way. Who, say, would like to be grabbed by the nose by an invisible hand? But that's what Griffin hates. For their narrow-mindedness, for their inertia, for their inability to be at least somewhat interested in what constitutes the subject of all his interests and the goal of his life - science. But is it only for this? Is their limitation worthy of such a strong feeling on his part? Of course not. Something else is worse. Griffin feels an inner kinship with them. He needs the tension of all his internal forces to break away from them. He fails to do this. Unless you stand apart. He is a philistine like them, he expresses their suppressed, unformed, but deeply rooted ideas about strength, power, greatness. Wells later recalled that when developing the image of Griffin, he thought about anarchists. At other times he might have named someone else. But every time we would talk about one or another political movement, based on the bourgeoisie. True, special - enraged.
Griffin is a man who has accomplished a scientific feat, and Griffin is a maniac obsessed with a thirst for power, Griffin is a product of the bourgeois environment and Griffin is its victim - what a complex image Wells created, deeply rooted in many trends of the 20th century! And what a “strong”, expressive, proportionate book in all its parts he wrote it into!
Is it any wonder that The Invisible Man is Wells's most widely read work to this day? And not only readable. Several films have been made based on The Invisible Man. Two of them are more famous than others. The first silent film, The Invisible Thief, was produced in 1909 by the French company Pathé. The second (it was called “The Invisible Man”) - in 1933 by the American director James Whale. This film was released at our box office and was a great success. Wells spoke of him with praise.
In 1934, he even declared that if The Invisible Man was read as much as it was in the year it appeared, it owed this entirely to Whale's excellent film. He was wrong, however. Nobody watches Whale's The Invisible Man now; Wells' novel is still read.
There are also countless literary imitations of this novel. Soon after the release of “The Invisible Man,” the extremely popular English writer Gilbert Chesterton, Wells’s eternal opponent, wrote a story about a man “intellectually invisible” - he is not noticed simply because everyone has become familiar with him. Jules Verne followed Wells much closer. This great science fiction writer did not immediately appreciate his English colleague, and his first interview about him, made in 1903, does not sound very respectful. But a year later, Jules Verne spoke about Wells in a different tone, and when his novel “The Mystery of Wilhelm Storitz” was posthumously published in 1910, it turned out that in his declining years he even began to imitate him - in this novel Jules Berne followed quite closely plot of "The Invisible Man". Wells was imitated a lot after that. "The Father of American Science Fiction" Hugo Gernsback used in one of the episodes of his main novel "Ralph 124 C 41 +" (1911), which takes place in 2660, "an apparatus that makes solids transparent" and thus (until then, while he irradiates them) invisible. This apparatus was created by Gernsback's hero after "experimentation with ultrashort waves convinced him that it was possible to achieve complete transparency of any object if we gave it a vibration frequency equal to the frequency of light." However, not everyone is as fascinated by this kind of technical detail as Gernsback. For example, Ray Bradbury did without them in “The Invisible Boy,” and they would have been out of place in this story, written as if in imitation of Chesterton, about a half-mad, lonely old woman who, in order to keep the boy with her, assures him that she has made him invisible . In moments, however, this paradoxically romantic story is still very close to Wells. So, in a completely Wellsian way, the scene is done where the old woman tells the boy that invisibility is gradually being “washed off” from him and he is “revealing himself” piece by piece. At some point he is still headless, then the whole thing is visible. This is very similar to that scene from The Invisible Man where Griffin, tearing off his bandages and clothes, “melts into thin air.” The hero just disappears there and appears here. Much has been written on the subject of Wells and other stories, funny and unpretentious. Such, for example, is the story of the English writer Norman Hunter “The Great Invisibility” (1937) - about invisible glass that everyone runs into...
"The Invisible Man" embodies many of the best features of Wells's writing style. Here we have before us truly a “fiction realist.” This provided him with such recognition. But The Invisible Man exists surrounded by other Wells novels. By the time it was created, behind the writer’s shoulders, in addition to “The Time Machine,” there was also “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” which was not recognized by contemporaries, but very soon also became a classic. Ahead were “War of the Worlds”, “When the Sleeper Awakens”, “The First Men on the Moon”. All these, as they are commonly called, “novels of the first cycle” were united not only by their common origin from “The Argonauts of Chronos”. A single thought lived in them, they were directed towards a common goal.
The same can be said about Wells's stories. He did not act as a short story writer for very long. Apart from one experience from his early years, “A Tale of the Twentieth Century,” published in 1887 in a small student magazine (Wells was then twenty-one years old), and then forgotten for many decades by both the author and, more importantly, the publishers, Wells’s stories first appeared in print in 1894 almost simultaneously with the magazine version of The Time Machine. They continued to appear regularly in newspapers and magazines throughout the years during which Wells wrote the first series of novels, but then their flow suddenly dried up, and after 1903 each new story became an increasingly rare event. The stories included in this collection cover this entire period. "The Stolen Bacillus" is among the first stories that brought Wells fame. It was published already in June 1894. "The Magic Shop" appeared exactly eight years later, in June 1903, among the stories with which Wells ended his regular career as a novelist.
Has his style changed over the years? I think no. Of course, he wrote a variety of stories, but almost everything he could do at the end, he could already do at the very beginning. Wells's stories, no matter what miracles they talk about, are always very everyday, often humorous, with many life signs and details, with laconic, but quite accurate and expressive characteristics of the characters. This is where he is always, a “realist of fiction”! The unusual is revealed in his stories not to fearless adventurers, but to quite ordinary people, and this collision of the incredible with the ordinary gives, at the will of the writer, the most varied effect. Sometimes we find it funny, sometimes we feel sad. The Martian expanses appear firsthand to an old antiquarian and taxidermist hounded by his family ("The Crystal Egg", 1897), and the ability to create miracles goes to a narrow-minded clerk, so narrow-minded that Wells does not have much difficulty in extracting so much comic relief from this situation that, perhaps, it would be enough for two or three humorous stories. ("The Man Who Could Work Miracles", 1898). In the story “The Remarkable Incident of Davidson's Eyes” (1895), Wells is very serious: he works through the material of individual human experience one of the hypothetical cases of space-time relations. But in "The Stolen Bacillus" and "The Newest Accelerator" (1901) he again - although in both cases we are talking about quite important things - makes us laugh out loud. Just look at the episode from “The Newest Accelerator” with the dog that fell from the sky! Or the cab races from The Stolen Bacillus!
At the same time, Wells does not at all strive to write stories that are specifically “funny” or, say, “scary.” He achieves a more complex aesthetic effect. Did he really want to make us laugh in The Stolen Bacillus? Of course not. The anarchist figure from this story (the first sketch of Griffin's image) looks both funny and a little tragic. Before us is a man who intends to take revenge on society in a wild and ugly way, but is it not society that has embittered him so much? He is obsessed with delusions of grandeur, but did it arise from the fact that he was humiliated all his life? Wells's stories cannot be called "flat", they are quite voluminous, and this quality is given to them, first of all, by the scale of the author's thoughts. There is a lot to be read behind the simple here.
Perhaps the most interesting story in this regard is “The Magic Shop.” It belongs to the genre that in Anglo-Saxon countries, in contrast to science fiction, is called “fantasy” - “fantasy”. Of course, we are not talking about science here. The owner of the shop with this name, which is quite common for English children (in London alone there are probably a good dozen toy shops under the sign of “The Magic Shop”), is a real and undeniable wizard, also one of the most inventive, endowed with an eerie sense of humor and considerable knowledge of human psychology. But the game he plays with Jip and his father (apparently Wells himself; the writer’s son was named Jip, and one of their favorite pastimes was buying tin soldiers together; the game room in their house was literally littered with them) is quite edifying. A good (or maybe evil?) wizard wants to show how much a child surpasses an adult in his sense of the miraculous, which means how much more open he is to everything new and unusual, how much more ready he is to face possible changes. Wells hated people who were committed to the familiar, the established, given once and for all. In this he saw one of the most unpleasant aspects of bourgeois consciousness for him. Wells wanted to destroy this immunity to the new with his stories - both their form and content. “The Magic Shop” is one of the most successful examples of this.
In Wells's stories and novels, the world is surprisingly mobile and subject to the most wonderful changes. Not only is it capable of change, but even today’s world, which is familiar to everyone, can be seen very differently.
In "The Time Machine" the Traveler, having traveled many millennia, finds a world that is new beyond recognition. Human relations, the people themselves, even the map of the sky have changed. But in the same novel there is an episode where the ordinary world is shown in an unusual aspect. Having set off in the time machine, the Traveler saw the housekeeper Mrs. Watchet enter his laboratory and, without noticing him, move towards the door to the garden. “It probably took her about a minute to cross the room, but it seemed to me like she went like a rocket.” Returning back, the Traveler again sees the same Mrs. Watchet. “But now her every movement seemed to me to be the opposite. First, a second door at the far end of the room opened, then, backing away, Mrs. Watchet appeared and disappeared behind the door through which she had previously entered.” The Newest Accelerator uses a similar technique. When the heroes are affected by a drug that speeds up the functioning of the body many times over, the world begins to live for them in such a slow rhythm that people seem to them like wax figures from Madame Tissot's museum... This technique is unlikely to surprise the modern reader. We are used to it in cinema, where fast and slow motion techniques are used. But Wells found this technique before the advent of cinema!
And the publicist Herbert George Wells is the author of many science fiction works that made him famous throughout the world and translated into many languages: “The Time Machine”, “War of the Worlds”, “Men Like Gods”, “The Island of Doctor Moreau” and others. Science fiction writers have repeatedly predicted incredible scientific discoveries; this is a well-known fact. Wells, by the way, long before Einstein and Minkowski showed in the novel “The Time Machine” that the real world is nothing more than a four-dimensional space-time substance.
In another book (“War of the Worlds”), the writer predicted modern wars using toxic substances and What did Wells come up with in his most paradoxical and popular work, “The Invisible Man”? A brief answer to this difficult question would sound like this: his hero made an attempt to change and speed up the life processes in the body. How seriously the scientific community takes the writer's imagination can be determined from the fact that the book caused a storm of controversy. The calculations were made in the most scientifically substantiated manner. The scientists' conclusion was clear: the invisible state contradicts common sense, which means it is impossible. This dispute began in 1897, from the moment the work was published, and has not yet ended.
So, H.G. Wells, “The Invisible Man”, a summary of the novel. The main character, the brilliant physicist Griffin, appears in a small tavern on a chilly day, wrapped in a cloak and hiding his face under a hat, bandages and huge glasses. It is impossible not to notice his oddities; he arouses the curiosity of others.
Gradually, the reader learns that the strange visitor whom G. Wells describes from the first lines is an invisible man. He tells his story to an old friend, also a scientist named Kemp, and the reader then finds out what happened to him. Griffin conducted experiments, invented a device that makes a living organism invisible, and a drug for bleaching blood. When there was not enough money for experiments, he conducted the experiment on himself, deciding to take on such an unusual appearance and get a lot of benefits from it. But everything turned out to be not so simple, and Wells vividly describes his ordeal.
“The Invisible Man”: a summary of the novel about a superman
Yes, this is precisely the task the author sets himself: an evil genius who opposes himself to all of humanity cannot and should not survive. It is strange that the filmmakers allowed themselves to interpret differently the accents that Wells clearly placed. “The Invisible Man” (a summary of the idea of the film of the same name by A. Zakharov) found such an embodiment on the Russian screen: Griffin is a misunderstood talent, and Kemp is an evil genius who is trying to prevent him from making great discoveries to save humanity. In the novel, everything is different. G. Wells himself has an inversely proportional attitude to this. The Invisible Man (the summary cannot contain all the brightness of the dialogues and discussions of the characters) is the same evil genius who wants to create a reign of terror and, through the fear of people, seize power over the world. But he is powerless alone, he needs shelter, food, help, and that’s why he came to Kemp’s house.
He, however, is not going to help him, he understands that the madman must be stopped, and calls the police in secret from his guest. The persecution of Griffin begins, and he, in turn, opens a hunt for his friend who betrayed him. The reader finds himself thinking that sometimes he sympathizes with this anti-hero - the invisible man experiences too sophisticated methods of bullying, as Wells describes. The summary of the book quite vividly conveys the inhuman suffering that a man who wanted to rise above everyone found himself subjected to.
The hero is very vulnerable: he is invisible only when completely naked, but as soon as he gets hurt or dirty, takes food or water, he begins to leave traces. This is what hunters use. The roads are strewn with broken glass, the whole world is up in arms against him and is persecuting him. After all, only when he is alive and unharmed, as Wells writes, is he an invisible man. The main characters, perhaps, are himself, the evil genius who challenged humanity, and the rest of humanity. And he is defeated. Life leaves him, and gradually the transparent outlines of a pathetic, wounded, naked “superman”, the albino Griffin, who turned his talent as a scientist into evil, appear on the earth. And that's why he lost.
