A man for his times - and ours

FICTION: PATRICIA CRAIGreviews A Man of PartsBy David Lodge Harvill Secker, 565pp. £18.99

'IT ALWAYS annoyed him that people didn't understand that fiction could only be made out of life," muses the central character of David Lodge's invigorating new novel, A Man of Parts. That the character in question is the novelist HG Wells underscores the tongue-in-cheek aplomb of Lodge's latest undertaking. This is a novel, like Colm Tóibín's The Master, like Lodge's own Author, Author(both about Henry James), which re-creates the life, or part of the life, of a literary figure while harnessing the transcendental power of fiction to add a dimension. It is also, in part, an attempt to rescue Wells from the slightly unsavoury portrayal of him as Herbert Methley in AS Byatt's The Children's Book(though Byatt's Methley, the apostle for sex, is, it seems, a cross between HG Wells and DH Lawrence, with a dash of John Cowper Powys thrown in).

Novels featuring historical characters have enjoyed something of a vogue over the past decade or so, and Wells, with his immersion in avant-garde activities, and endless amours, makes a suitable subject for imaginative reconstruction.

The Wells life story is also a case history in advancement by talent and determination. Nothing about his origins – he was born above a china shop on Bromley High Street, on the Kent fringes of London, in 1866 – suggested he might rise in the world, but rise he did. By 1920 Wells could claim to be “the most famous writer in the world”, as well as being among the most prolific. His novels and other writings, it’s true, are touched by a kind of Edwardian tedium and defunct topicality, and as a consequence are not attuned to present-day tastes.

You can’t, however, make the same complaint about his life, which encompasses a good deal of the elan of the era. HG Wells (“HG” as he’s mostly called here) was not only a celebrated author but also a social reformer, an advanced thinker, a lecturer and teacher of prodigious gifts, a technological prophet (though his predictions for the future weren’t invariably right), a mover in literary circles and, above all, a sexual liberationist whose entanglements with women tend to overwhelm all other aspects of his biography.

Married in succession to a couple of wives who failed to match his sexual drive, HG promptly set about securing the missing element in his life. Despite an appearance not on a par with his intellectual attributes, he had only to raise his finger (so to speak) to draw to himself a bevy of intelligent and enamoured young women, all avid to do his bidding. The list of his sexual conquests (undertaken with the blessing, or at least the tolerance, of his astonishingly compliant second wife, Jane) reads like a roll-call of early-20th-century literary women.

Rosamond Bland (the supposed natural but actually adopted daughter of E Nesbit), Amber Reeves, Dorothy Richardson, Violet Hunt, Elizabeth von Arnim, Rebecca West: these loom largest, perhaps, in the HG extramarital parade of partners-in-concupiscence, but they’re interspersed with many others who have faded into the background (or are written out of the story altogether).

Wells himself was prevented by the mores of the day (and his potential sales figures) from going in for erotic explicitness in his fiction. What you get instead, at crucial moments (as Rebecca West noted) is something like, “Oh, my dear,” followed by a row of dots. David Lodge, fortunately, has no such prohibition imposed on him, but neither does he make a lurid business of his subject’s goings-on. HG’s affairs, in the eyes of himself and his re-creator, merely constitute a rational response to a universal impulse, if one more strongly developed in some individuals than in others.

Actually, for quite long stretches A Man of Partsreads like straightforward biography. HG's troubles with the Fabian Society, his travels abroad, home life, critical reception of his books and relations with other literary luminaries, such as Henry James, all get a showing. (Fed up, perhaps, with James's circumlocutory admonitions dressed up as praise, HG retaliated by parodying "the Master" in his jeu d'esprit Boon, which didn't go down at all well.) But then the novelist's inventiveness supervenes, leading sometimes to tremendously funny scenes, such as the one in which Dorothy Richardson , about to have sex with HG, calmly removes her knickers and raises her knees on a patch of bracken near Tunbridge Wells, all the while expatiating on the Russian novel – or takes HG to task on account of his flawed sentence construction.

A framing device, which enhances the fictional element, has HG playing devil’s advocate to himself in a series of question-and-answer examinations of his ethics. “He’s talking to himself again,” observes his daughter-in-law near the start of the novel, but in fact, as far as narrative impetus is concerned, it’s just a way of putting us in touch with HG’s thoughts, recollections and preoccupations. Or, if you like, for once-Catholic Lodge, it’s a kind of deflected, late-life examination of conscience. Not that theology, or atonement, comes into it. Lodge’s robust approach, his insights, energy and humour, enable him to present HG as a man not only for his own times but also for ours.

Patricia Craig is a critic and author. Her most recent book is a memoir, Asking for Trouble