Lodge, David "A Man of Parts"

Lodge, David "A Man of Parts" - 2011

The author starts this book with "Nearly everything that happens in this story is based on factual sources. With one significant exception, all the named characters were real people. Quotations from their books, plays, articles, letters, journals, etc., are their own words. But I have used a novelist’s licence in representing what they thought, felt, and said to each other; and I have imagined some events and personal details which history omitted to record. So this book is a novel, and structured like a novel."

I was made aware of this story because I had read a few books that were based on H.G. Wells' novels:

Palma, Félix J. "The Map of Time" (E: El mapa del tiempo) - 2008 (based on "The Time Machine")
- "The Map of the Sky" (E: El mapa del cielo) - 2012 (based on "The War of the Worlds") 
- "The Map of Chaos" (E: El mapa del caos) - 2014 (based on "The Invisible Man")

After that, I also read "The Time Machine", I had already watched the old film version which I really like.

So, this is about H.G. Wells' life. I must admit, I had no idea about the guy beforehand, otherwise I might not have undertaken this book. Not because it has more than 500 pages or because it was badly written. I just came to dislike the famous author. I mean, he had a brilliant mind and foresaw many developments that nobody thought about it until then. He was an adulterer, a sexually obsessed maniac who promoted "free love" only so he could have several mistresses and was still proud that his wife agreed to it. He fathered quite a few children with several women. It might have been nice for him but I wouldn't have wanted to be any of those women who had to bring up their illegitimate children (even with his financial help) in a time where that did not agree with any sort of social status. It was all right and fine for Mr. Wells, though. Well, he was a man. Even in our modern times, I don't think anyone would agree with his sort of behaviour towards women.

All in all, an interesting read but somehow I wish I hadn't learned so much about this guy.

From the back cover:

"'The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy, but he has done with prophecy now...'

Sequestered in his blitz-battered Regent's Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, 'H.G.' to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. Has it been a success or a failure? Once he was the most famous writer in the world, 'the man who invented tomorrow'; now he feels like yesterday's man, deserted by readers and depressed by the collapse of his utopian dreams.

He recalls his unpromising start, and early struggles to acquire an education and make a living as a teacher; his rapid rise to fame as a writer with a prophetic imagination and a comic common touch which brought him into contact with most of the important literary, intellectual, and political figures of his time; his plunge into socialist politics; his belief in free love, and energetic practice of it. Arguing with himself about his conduct, he relives his relationships with two wives and many mistresses, especially the brilliant student Amber Reeves and the gifted writer Rebecca West, both of whom bore him children, with dramatic and long-lasting consequences.

Unfolding this astonishing story, David Lodge depicts a man as contradictory as he was talented: a socialist who enjoyed his affluence, an acclaimed novelist who turned against the literary novel; a feminist womaniser, sensual yet incurably romantic, irresistible and exasperating by turns, but always vitally human."