{"id":6959,"date":"2015-03-17T19:30:06","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T23:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=6959"},"modified":"2015-03-17T19:30:06","modified_gmt":"2015-03-17T23:30:06","slug":"tono-bungay-by-h-g-wellseveryman-1994-originally-macmillan-1909","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/tono-bungay-by-h-g-wellseveryman-1994-originally-macmillan-1909\/","title":{"rendered":"Tono-Bungay by H.G. WellsEveryman, 1994 (Originally Macmillan, 1909)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read Tono-Bungay<\/em> for a class in college in 2001, and apparently liked it enough at the time to keep my copy of it, but when I started re-reading it, I didn\u2019t really remember anything about it. As John Hammond says in his introduction to the book, it’s the story of \u201ca pragmatic narrator divided against himself whose theme is the slow decline and fragmentation of England.\u201d <\/p>\n

The book is divided into four parts, centered around the narrator (George Ponderevo) and the Tono-Bungay of the title, which is a patent medicine that his uncle invents. So we get George\u2019s life in \u201cThe Days before Tono-Bungay was Invented,\u201d during \u201cThe Rise of Tono-Bungay” and “The Great Days of Tono-Bungay,\u201d and in \u201cThe Aftermath of Tono-Bungay\u201d: the fact that there\u2019s a rise and an aftermath should tell you something about the arc of this story. The short version: George grows up as the son of a housekeeper at a big country house, but is sent away at age fourteen after he fights with a guest of the house who\u2019s about his age. After a time with his mother\u2019s poor and religious cousin, he ends up living with his aunt and uncle—this uncle is his father\u2019s brother, who\u2019s a pharmacist. His uncle goes bankrupt after some ill-advised stock speculations, but then invents Tono-Bungay (which he hires George to help him with) and quickly makes a lot of money and rises socially, and everything\u2019s great until the business goes bad, at which point everything falls apart. <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember what I liked about Tono-Bungay<\/em> when I first read it, but my main feeling this time around was basically, \u201cwow, I think I like my books to be a lot less idea-driven.\u201d That theme mentioned in the introduction, \u201cthe slow decline and fragmentation of England\u201d? There\u2019s a lot of that. There\u2019s a lot about the world of the English country house and its surrounding land and dependent village, and how that\u2019s all going away. There\u2019s a lot about shifts related to class and place, how London buildings built as single-family homes are badly converted and rented out, despite their lack of basic amenities like real kitchens. There\u2019s a lot about the relations between men and women, what they\u2019re like for the narrator and what he thinks they should be like. There\u2019s a a bit about socialism, and capitalism, and a whole lot about the rise of an advertising-driven consumer culture.<\/p>\n

But the parts of the book that struck me most were the concrete descriptive bits, like when the narrator talks about going to live in London and being struck by its beauty by day:<\/p>\n

It shone, pale amber, blue-grey and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. (91)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

or by night:<\/p>\n

And after the ordinary overcast day, after dull mornings, came twilight, and London lit up and became a thing of white and yellow and red jewels of light and wonderful floods of golden illumination and stupendous and unfathomable shadows — and there were no longer any mean or shabby people — but a great mysterious movement of unaccountable beings…. (92)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m glad to have re-read this if only for the lovely set-piece just before the end of the book, in which George is going down the Thames for a test run in a warship he\u2019s built, and describing the sight of London streaming past: St. Paul\u2019s, the Tower, Greenwich, all the ships and activity of the port, and then the sea. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read Tono-Bungay for a class in college in 2001, and apparently liked it enough at the time to keep my copy of it, but when I started re-reading it, I didn\u2019t really remember anything about it. As John Hammond says in his introduction to the book, it’s the story of \u201ca pragmatic narrator divided […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}