The History of Mr. Polly

Rating:
Summary: Is it Me?
Review: A friend recommended this book to me after I explained how much fun I was having after leaving work in DC, returning to Minnesota, playing with my kids, joining a mountain biking team and genuinely enjoying my unemplyed status for 9 months. She said it was a philosophical book.

I spent the entire book trying to figure out why she thought of this book after I got through telling her how great my life was at the present. Mr. Polly clearly was not living a great life and always seemed to be on the wrong side of circumstance. It wasn't until the very end of the book that I realized the context my friend applied to my happenings.

The book, for it's strange accents and period vocabulary, was as riveting as any Grisham or Baldacci novel. I don't really know why - but it was. And the last few pages makes one think very hard about the meaning of life, which even for an unemployed child-at-heart, is important to do now and again.

Rating:
Summary: The sunny and lovable side of H.G. Wells
Review: As it happens this is one of my ten favourite books; but I'm writing about the book's quality, not about my feelings for it. Some of Wells's rhetorical tricks are, to be blunt, cheap. Consider his tendency to get out of a hole by ending a paragraph with a row of dots ...

Also there's that habit of spelling out the speech of the lower classes phoenetically - "Wot's 'e reely want?" - in a puzzling fashion; after all, "really" and "reely" have the same pronounciation, and it's not as if people by their very speech let us know that they can't spell.

All the same the book is utterly charming - the sunniest thing Wells ever wrote. Mr. Polly may have begun life as a sort of Wellisish stick figure but he quickly acquired life and became genuinely noble - and not in the usual Wells way (acknowledging his responsibility to Mankind as a whole, setting out to save the world, etc.). This is the story of how someone with dull surroundings, upbringings and acquaintances manages to find his true niche. It isn't the usual Wells niche.

And Mr. Polly's habit of creatively misusing words might at first sound like Wells's way of making fun of him; but it becomes in the end his greatest strength. So don't let what I said about Wells's bag of rehetorical tricks put you off. The man had genuine talent; he was just lazy with it on occasion, and the quality of writing in "The History of Mr. Polly" is mostly high. (Everyone who says it is Wells's funniest book is right.) I can't claim this is one of the ten *best* books I've read; but I frequently wish I could.

Rating:
Summary: tragi-comedy
Review: I finished reading this novella a few days ago. I must first admit that for the first 25 or so pages, I wasn't particulaly tuned into what the book was about. It is, as Wells mentioned, a history, so I was rather thrown at the beginning. Once I got the gist of it, particularly the gist of Mr. Polly and his eccentricities, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The only other Wells book I had read was the Island of Dr. Moreau, which, like his other romantic science-fiction novels he is famous for, was somewhat plot-driven rather than character-driven. This book, is, as the title would lead you to suspect, character-driven.

We begin our read with the bored, frustrated Mr. Polly, what he is feeling and how he deals with his life in general. Then the actual history starts, and Wells's beautiful, if somewhat excessive vocabulary answers the reader's question of who this Mr. Polly is. I found him to a be a very refreshing hero, being rather ordinary, and dealing with the concerns of anyone's life, particularly that of a middle-aged man. He does not "save the day" by perfoming any conventional (or even moral) acts, but this only makes him more real. Mr. Polly's passion for epithet is absolutely delightful, and gave me a great sense of pleasure to watch him go about his transformation.

This was a terriffic, merry little book, with a central character worthy of some of the finest in literature, at least from the limited literature I have read. Don't be fooled by the humorous facade however; there is a deeper message, one which will become relevant at some time in all our lives. It isn't one of Wells's most well known books, but it should be. A superb little gem.

Rating:
Summary: tragi-comedy
Review: I finished reading this novella a few days ago. I must first admit that for the first 25 or so pages, I wasn't particulaly tuned into what the book was about. It is, as Wells mentioned, a history, so I was rather thrown at the beginning. Once I got the gist of it, particularly the gist of Mr. Polly and his eccentricities, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The only other Wells book I had read was the Island of Dr. Moreau, which, like his other romantic science-fiction novels he is famous for, was somewhat plot-driven rather than character-driven. This book, is, as the title would lead you to suspect, character-driven.

We begin our read with the bored, frustrated Mr. Polly, what he is feeling and how he deals with his life in general. Then the actual history starts, and Wells's beautiful, if somewhat excessive vocabulary answers the reader's question of who this Mr. Polly is. I found him to a be a very refreshing hero, being rather ordinary, and dealing with the concerns of anyone's life, particularly that of a middle-aged man. He does not "save the day" by perfoming any conventional (or even moral) acts, but this only makes him more real. Mr. Polly's passion for epithet is absolutely delightful, and gave me a great sense of pleasure to watch him go about his transformation.

This was a terriffic, merry little book, with a central character worthy of some of the finest in literature, at least from the limited literature I have read. Don't be fooled by the humorous facade however; there is a deeper message, one which will become relevant at some time in all our lives. It isn't one of Wells's most well known books, but it should be. A superb little gem.

Rating:
Summary: Superficially Comic but Grim and Hopeless Beneath
Review: Mr.Polly is one of H.G. Wells' novels of contemporary society, albeit with a comic dimension, detailing the escape of an archtypical "little man" from a life of quiet desperation. It is splendidly read by Clive Swift, an inspired choice, who by his voice inflexions and range of accent conveys brilliantly the ethos of precarious respectability and suffocating normality in which the anti-hero lives. This reading of the novel conveys the very feel of that lost lower-middle class, pre-World War I, world of minute social gradations, of stifling conformity and of emerging awareness of the potential for change through education and science. Hearing it some nine decades on one is very uncomfortably aware that this entire world is about to be scorched away and that the young shop-assistants and tradesmen who populate it have an appointment with destiny in the Pals' Battalions they will flock to when Armageddon looms. Wells' portrayal of the nuances of this world is sharply delineated, reflecting direct personal experience, and the frequent comedy never obscures the accuracy of the observation. Despite the humour - bordering on the farcical in Mr.Polly's confrontation with the dreaded Uncle Jim - there is a hollow centre to the story. Mr. Polly may escape one round of futility, but the liberation he discovers is scarcely more life or spirit-enhancing than that which he left behind. The book ends with Mr.Polly (it is notable that one still cannot drop the Mr., that defining badge of respectability) achieving a degree of animal contentment but still oppressed by a sense of the futility of existence. In this, as in his Science Fiction, Wells' vision is barren and hopeless. He was capable, as almost no other writer before or since, of visualising material progress with uncanny accuracy, but he missed any sense of the potential and grandeur of the human spirit. It is this that makes this story, though superficially enjoyable, finally so unsatisfactory.

Rating:
Summary: Best Book You've Never Heard Of
Review: The climactic and hilarious confrontation between Mr. Polly and the low-life ruffian Uncle Jim is so masterful that one might forget all the other comic gems included in this novel. At the same time, the reader will feel the power of Wells' legendary intelligence on every page. The History of Mr. Polly is loaded with thought-provoking observations on the topics of marraige, love, business, education, friendship, insurance fraud and -- most of all -- happiness.

Rating:
Summary: Tragic and comic and good
Review: The History of Mr. Polly is less known than Well's sci-fi classics and it is a different kind of a book too. It pictures a tragicomic story of an unusual character - Mr. Polly. The story is quite funny, but there underneath is a deeper meaning. There are people like Mr. Polly around us. They drift through their lives wondering if it is them or the environment that determined their fate.

Although Wells and Dostoyevsky are extremely diferent, Mr. Polly in a certain way reminds me of some Dostoyevsky's characters.

Very interesting book. Very well read by Clive Swift.

If you like this book, I can recommend you to read both Invisible Man by Wells and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky.

Rating:
Summary: "The poisoned fountains of English literature."
Review: When "The History of Mr. Polly" by H.G. Wells begins, he is a 37-year-old shopkeeper, locked in an unhappy marriage, troubled by perpetual indigestion, and with a business facing bankruptcy. As Mr. Polly contemplates his life, the story folds back to Mr. Polly's birth, childhood, and inadequate education. Sent to school at six, and yanked out by his father at age 14, his formal education is a hodge podge of largely useless facts and figures. He does, however, acquire a lifelong love of reading, an imagination, and a sense of adventure and romance.

At 14, Mr. Polly is apprenticed to a large hosiery and gentleman's outfitting shop. There he lives with his fellow apprentices and witnesses an act of sheer rebellion launched by the creative apprentice Parsons. This rebellion--explosive from Mr. Polly's point of view, and pure hilarious fun to the reader--becomes an event which gathers importance in Mr. Polly's mind, and yet, at the same time, he cannot understand his friend's moral outrage. Mr. Polly eventually leaves this position and embarks upon a series of increasingly less meaningful, and less optimistic employment. As one of "the drifting shoal" seeking employment, Mr. Polly is a mediocre prospect, and the only thing that truly seizes his employers' attention is Mr. Polly's unfortunate ability to lapse into his own peculiar terminology.

Haunted by the idea that he's missing something in life, Mr. Polly marries. It's a practical arrangement and seems perfectly sensible to him at the time. However--it is soon all too clear that Mr. Polly's marriage is just as dreary as his career. As a shopkeeper in Fishbourne, his only creative outlet is reading, and books are resented terribly by the unimaginative Mrs. Polly--a woman who cooked "with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the quality or the consequences."

One incident sets Mr. Polly free from his prison, and he ventures forth for an adventure. It is during these travels that Mr. Polly takes a moral stand and finally gains stature as a human being. H.G. Wells captures perfectly the behaviour of the shopkeepers who view Mr. Polly with suspicion and disdain, and it's to the author's credit that the tale remains wonderfully light. This novel--in the hands of--let's say Thomas Hardy (one of all my-time favourites) would be a dire, depressing read with great social significance. Instead, Mr. Polly is an amusing, flawed, average, and very human character, but we delight in his mind, and even chuckle over his humdrum life. "The History of Mr. Polly" is a delightful novel--witty, good-natured, refreshing, and highly recommended--displacedhuman