Second paragraph of third chapter:
“The way ’e notices, you know. Never forgets so much as anything,” she would confide to other nurses as they pursued their way toward the gardens. “Knows ’is own mind, ’e does, and isn’t afraid to let you know it, either.”
I was moved to pick this up by a mention in Jon Pertwee’s autobiography that this was the book which established his father as a successful writer. I am not sure if that is true, but it’s definitely the case that it was published in 1919, the year that Jon was born. (Jon was the younger of two sons; his older brother Michael was an actor and screenwriter, whose most famous credit is probably adapting Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for the cinema.)
Our Wonderful Selves is not a great book, and having recently read all of H.G. Wells’ fictional output from the start of the twentieth century, I think I know what Roland Pertwee was trying and failing to match.
His protagonist is a really unpleasant writer, who manages through arrogance to get a big theatrical opportunity for his Art; he bullies and plans to betray his wife, who has dedicated herself to making it possible for him to promote his talents; and his much smarter uncle saves the day by reconciling them. Really, it’s not a very convincingly happy ending; he is unlikely to reform, and she would be much better off without him. Given the writer’s own shaky marriage, he may have been writing in part to work through his own demons.
Pertwee’s top book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is The Islanders (1951), for younger readers, about three boys who get to live by themselves on an island in Devon and fight off the Romani. I think I’ll give it a miss.
You can get Our Wonderful Selves here.
This was the non-genre novel that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton, but I will leave it until either I finish all the books acquired in 2022, or it bubbles to the top of my 2023 pile, which will probably happen first.
