149 pages
Published 1897
Read from March 27 to March 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
I hadn't set out to reread The Invisible Man. Yesterday's mail delivered a copy of After London by Richard Jefferies, a postapocalyptic novel published at the precocious date of 1885; flipping through it, I found what I feel to be a contender for the most dynamic opening hook from any pre-1900 "scientific romance":
The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.The only contemporary opening hook that can compete, I think, is from Wells' The War of the Worlds. I can't decide which opening is stronger, in part because the effectiveness of The War of the Worlds has been blunted by familiarity -- I've read the book at least a couple dozen times. But I got to checking out the opening lines of other early sci-fi books for comparison, and before I knew it, I found myself absorbed in reading The Invisible Man on Project Gutenberg. It was one of my favorite books as a young teen, in part because Wells' narration is so immediate and modern. Recalling the book in recent years, I have asserted that The Invisible Man can be seen in retrospect as the first modern technothriller -- Michael Crichton's trademark journalistic narration is anticipated here, and the tension of Kemp keeping Griffin distracted by drawing out his story from him while the constabulary arrives is still effective, all these years (and rereadings) later. The climactic chase through Port Burdock is less effective than I recalled, and I picked up on way more of the period's endemic prejudice and race theory than I caught as a teen, but the book as a whole is still superb -- as can be seen by how I got so hooked that I read the whole thing on my phone almost without meaning to.
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