Second paragraph of third chapter:

He lay in hospital for a long spell, painful but self-satisfied. The nature of his injuries was not yet clear to him. Presently he would get all right again. “V.C.,” he whispered. “At twenty. Pretty decent.”

This is the last of the set of novels by H.G. Wells that I bought in 2019 and have been working my way through ever since. I’m glad to say that after a couple of real duds, I have ended on a high note. It’s a very long book, and you know where it is going as soon as you see the title, but I found it very worthwhile and interesting.

Joan and Peter are cousins, and are orphaned quite early in the book and brought up together. Their guardianship passes from a pair of eccentric left-wing aunts (“I suspect them strongly of vegetarianism”), to a monstrous conservative cousin (“In spite of its loyalty, Ulster is damp”), to another cousin, war hero Oswald who has been busy civilising Africa and wants to do the same for England, or at least for the two children who he has ended up with.

Wells’ Big Theme for the book is education, and Oswald’s efforts to secure it for both Peter and Joan (“if women were to be let out of purdah they might as well be let right out”), but if you can ignore the lengthy philosophising about that, and the certainty that the White Man hath his Burden, there’s rather a good human story between Oswald and Peter’s parents at the start, and then between Oswald, Joan and Peter.

The two kids both have plenty of other potential lovers apart from each other, but I am a bit of a romantic at heart and I do like the slow path to the (spoiler) happy ending. Adam Roberts didn’t; he found the pace far too slow. I was reading a couple of other very long books at the time, so it suited me. I will agree with Adam that Wells makes Joan sound unnecessarily childish, even as an adult.

There are some great lines. Here’s one of Joan’s unsuccessful boyfriends:

…when Huntley went on to suggest that the path to freedom lay in the heroic abandonment of the “fetish of chastity,” Joan was sensible of a certain lagging of spirit.

Here are the lefty aunts:

Aunt Phoebe sat near Aunt Phyllis and discoursed on whether she ought to go to prison for the Vote. “I try to assault policemen,” she said. “But they elude me.”

Here’s one of the failed educational theorists who Oswald interviews:

Hinks of Carchester, the distinguished Greek scholar, slipped into his hand at parting a pamphlet asserting that only Greek studies would make a man write English beautifully and precisely. Unhappily for his argument Hinks had written his pamphlet neither beautifully nor precisely.

And here’s just a nice bit of scene-setting:

Slowly, smoothly, unfalteringly, the brush of the twilight had been sweeping its neutral tint across the spectacle, painting out the glittering symbols one by one. A chill from outer space fell down through the thin Russian air, a dark transparent curtain. Oswald shivered in his wadded coat. Abruptly down below, hard by a ghostly white church, one lamp and then another pricked the deepening blue. A little dark tram-car that crept towards them out of the city ways to fetch them back into the city, suddenly became a glow-worm…

As with Mr Polly, there is a crucial plot twist depending on a fake death by drowning.

Also, uniquely in Wells’ work as far as I have read it, there is a significant section set in Ireland. Wells’ characters generally float back and forth on Home Rule (more forth than back); here, Peter and Oswald go on a fact-finding mission to pre-war Dublin and are a bit disappointed with the facts that they find, while the monstrous conservative cousin Lady Charlotte throws her energy into Unionism:

“We’re raising money to get those brave Ulstermen guns. Something has to be done if these Liberals are not to do as they like with us. They and their friends the priests.”

There’s a certain amount of “these tedious people and their comic accents quarreling with each other rather than working for a better world society”, but there’s also some good observation based on personal experience, rather than just reading the newspapers.

This was a positive note to end two of my projects on: working through the H.G. Wells back catalogue, as I mentioned, and also finishing all the unread books that I acquired in 2019. So it’s another to add to this list:

Last book acquired in 2019, read in April 2025 (Joan and Peter)
Last book acquired in 2018, read in November 2024 (The Geraldines)
Last book acquired in 2017, read in January 2024 (Rule of Law: A Memoir)
Last book acquired in 2016, read in August 2023 (Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan)
Last book acquired in 2015, read in November 2022 (Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait)
Last books acquired in 2014, read in October 2021 (The Empire of Time and Crashland)
Last book acquired in 2013, read in October 2020 (Helen Waddell)
Last book acquired in 2012, read in May 2020 (A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese dialogue 2000-2003)
Last book acquired in 2011, read in October 2019 (Luck and the Irish)
Last book acquired in 2010, read in January 2019 (Heartspell)
Last book acquired in 2009, read in December 2016 (Last Exit to Babylon)

At this rate I’ll catch up with myself around 2028. (I won’t.)

This unlocks my lists of books acquired in 2020:

• The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt (shortest)
• Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold (SF longest unread)
• A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke (non-fiction longest unread)
• All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham (top on LibraryThing)

None of the unread non-genre fiction on my shelves was acquired in 2020.