Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island: the Novel as Fable

Abstract

From the beginning to the end of his literary career Wells was an experimental novelist, continually seeking fresh forms for the expression of his ideas. Throughout the decade following the immense upheaval of the First World War he continued to experiment with fiction, producing a number of promising novels and fantasias and testing out a variety of approaches in fictional form. The Undying Fire: A Contemporary Novel (1919) is a flawed but brave attempt to recast the Book of Job in a form appropriate to the needs and problems of the twentieth century. In The Dream (1924), a fine and much neglected work, the narrator looks back on a typical Victorian lifetime from the perspective of twenty centuries hence. Christina Alberta’s Father (1925) explores in the form of a comic novel the theme of self-delusion, whilst Meanwhile: The Picture of a Lady (1927) is a dialogue novel in which the guests at a house party discuss a range of contemporary issues against the background of the General Strike.

I would like to suggest, then, that a literary game may be seen as any playful, self-conscious and extended means by which an author stimulates his reader to deduce or to speculate, by which he encourages him to see a relationship between different parts of the text, or between the text and something extraneous to it.

(Peter Hutchinson, Games Authors Play)

The gist of Rampole Island is a caricature-portrait of the whole human world.

(H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography)