A Man of Parts
ABOUT
THE BOOK
2013 Longlist
A moving, funny and masterful novel about the life of H.G. Wells – writer, thinker, lover and man of genius.
‘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.
(From Publisher)
About the Author
David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks…, Author, Author and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.
Librarian’s Comments
This novel, written in a sarcastic (or even sardonic) stylistic of a diptych, is an analysis of the dramatic situation of artists in the modern society, obsessed with commercial needs and passions of consumers. They have no chance to break the barriers of disinterest of the public and its disapproval for every task needed to understand an ambitious work of art.