After writing my reflection on Tono-Bungay, I read Adam Roberts’s thoughts in his excellent literary biography of Wells — you can read almost the same account in this blog post — and was interested to see that Adam talked about all sorts of really important things that I had totally neglected. And yet I still think that my take on the book is valid and useful. It’s an indication of the book’s quality, I think, that such widely divergent readings can nevertheless capture real insights into its world.
One brief thought: Adam’s portrayal of Uncle Ponderevo as a cokehead — twitching, full of nervous energy, increasingly obese and yet simultaneously somehow withered — echoes Wells’s portrayal of modern London as hypertrophied, massively diseased. Uncle Ponderevo as London in microcosm; London as a macrocosmic Uncle Ponderevo. (Which is, by the way, a very Adam-Robertsian theme: see, e.g., Swiftly, the first novel of his I read, with its conceit that Gulliver’s Travels was reportage, not fiction.)
