Boon: the Novelist Dissected

Abstract

Boon — or to give it its full title Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump — occupies a somewhat ambiguous place in Wells studies. Neither a conventional novel on the one hand nor a volume of essays on the other, it sits uncomfortably in that vague no man’s land occupied by such works as Tristram Shandy and Finnegan’s Wake, a literary oddity. Critics have never known quite what to make of it, and the book has been described variously as ‘a rag-bag’, ‘a farrago’ and ‘a compost heap’.³⁸ Critical discussion of Boon has concentrated almost entirely on one chapter — ‘Of Art, of Literature, of Mr Henry James’ — in which there is a biting parody of James’s style and an illuminating debate between the Jamesian and Wellsian attitudes to the novel. The chapter is certainly of fundamental importance to an understanding of Wells’s approach to literature, but the bypassing of the remainder (and the substantial part) of the book has meant that Boon has been consistently underrated as a work of fiction.

I once told H. G. Wells and, after reflection, he agreed with my analysis, that at least two people struggled inside him, Herbert and George. Bert reacted; George dreamed.

(Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Volume of Autobiography)

With the breakdown of specific boundaries the validity of the logical process beyond finite ends breaks down. We make our truth for our visible purposes as we go along, and if it does not work we make it afresh. We see life once more as gallant experiment.

(H. G. Wells, Boon)