Blog posts flurry!

4 blog posts in 2 days, following 11 months of silence! I've not read a lot lately, my excuse being the "looking for a new job, finding it, changing job"-thing... Not a great excuse, but the only one I've got :)

So now that I'm going to try to find some time for me again, I've decided that I should at least sum up the books I've read in that period, hence the Nineteen eighty-four, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Doctor Moreau posts that were quite short since it's been a while since I've finished them... And since I've been busy, I've read mostly short stuff, mangas, comics and so on, but nothing too long. I even tried starting La Terre from Zola but couldn't get past 20 pages...

So, the next ones are going to change a lot from my latest readings since first, the writer is not dead (I think) and second, it reaches the limit of the "pocket book": with more than 800 pages, written in small characters, it is... a song of ice and fire.

I won't probably post before a while again :-D

The Island of Doctor Moreau

I've finished this book about a couple of weeks ago, and couldn't put it down. Here again, as in all books I've read by Wells, you will find a strange situation, product of Well's imagination, coupled with an analysis of humanity through the prism of that situation. And contrarily to The War of the Worlds, the narrative appealed to me and I find it quite modern, rapid, and found myself taken in the story.

(Spoiler incoming, be warned!!!) 

So Edward Prendick is dying alone on a small boat, when he is rescued in extremis and left on a completely isolated island with Montgomery, the mysterious doctor Moreau and quite a menagerie. The other companions of Montgomery have strange shapes and behaviours, and the island seems inhabited by quite a number of these strangely shaped individuals. Gradually, Prendick realizes where he has already heard the name of Moreau and he discovers what sort of experiences the mysterious doctor does on this island. Basically, Moreau is trying to transform animals into humans, by vivisecting them, transforming them into imperfect human images. In the process, these animals endure months of physical torture, which Moreau dismisses as a necessity for his experiments. Moreau also tries to put in them some notions of humanity which the creatures adopt like a law: to not taste blood, to not go on all four... He has turned dozens of animals, dogs, swine, apes, hyena; his current creation's screams of pain invade Prendick's mind... But one day, this puma escapes and ends up killing Moreau. Living with the "Beast folk", Prendick can observe that what's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh as the animals slowly lose the ability to speak and revert to animals, until he is finally able to flee on a raft and is picked up by a boat.

This novel certainly lacks the depths of thought that The Time Machine could bring you afterwards, but it's nonetheless a great story, with a great inventiveness, and a great storytelling. And when you know it's been written at the end of the nineteenth century, you have to realize what an incredibly advanced mind HG Wells must have been during his time!

The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds is a very well known HG Wells novel. It's been talked about recently since there must have been a Hollywood blockbuster about it, which I did not see... but I've heard about it through the stuff you missed in history class podcast, which aired a podcast about Orson Wells' rendition of the War of the Worlds on radio and the mass panic it has caused back in 1938. And since I've just finished two great novels by HG Wells, I was decided to go on with this one.

In a nutshell, capsules come from the sky, with aliens inside. Aliens then fabricate huge walking machines and start spreading death and destruction through their heat-rays. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who slowly reconstructs it through his own experience and what he has learned afterwards, from the capsule falling from the sky to the abrupt end of the invaders.

I do not know if that's because we are now too used to stories of aliens invading Earth, but I find the story boring and lacking in rhythm. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that it was plenty crazy and innovative back at the end of the nineteenth century, but I've been disappointed by this one, I think mostly because of the narrative process. I think it illustrates rather well the idea I've got that even if you have a great story, you can ruin it if you don't tell it the right way...

Anyway, I have this other book by H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, I hope I can enjoy the story as well as the The Invisible Man and The Time Machine...

Nineteen Eighty-Four

It's been what? 10 years since I first read 1984? I remembered that the situation that was described was very miserably absurd, but that it was so much possible for humanity to come down to this that it made me sad... Other than that, I did not remember much about the story in itself (which proves my point, writing this blog may indeed be useful to help me remember what I do!).

Re-discovering Orwell's masterpiece was great but again, so saddening. So completely had I forgotten the end that I kept hoping that Winston and Julia could make it through all this. But their humanity is slowly and irreversibly crushed... I don't think I can go over the book in details now since I'm catching up on 6 months of reading on and off.

Simply, it's clearly THE dystopian reference novel, with a exaggeratedly pessimistic vision of the future of mankind, or at least, you hope that it's exaggerated. In the world we live in, I'm not as shocked with the assumed violence of IngSoc or the futile perpetual war that assures the stability of the governing class, because these things already exist in our democracies to some extents, disguised behind politics and lobbies. But concepts such as doublethink make me shudder, it eliminates the freedom to think that makes us humans; you watch the telescreen but the telescreen also watches you, which eliminates your right to privacy.

1984 is dark and powerful, it makes you think, hope for mankind nonetheless, and makes you appreciate better what you have. I think it closes my dystopian readings, and since I've really appreciated HG Wells' novels (The Invisible Man and The Time Machine), I'm moving on to the next ones, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau.