Just Finished Reading The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

Seeing that I am in the prolonged (for reasons which I will reveal in the future) process of reading a rather lengthy novel (The Mysterious Island) by renown science fiction writer Jules Verne, I decided to tackle something shorter by another famous author within this genre.  So I picked H.G. Wells, probably more famous for his stories The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, and read his 1897 short novel The Invisible Man.  The title is the same as a sci-fi thriller movie in which the villain is a complete terror...or at least that's how I remember it from childhood.  But that isn't how Wells portrays, at least initially, his protagonist, a brilliant young physicist named Griffin who, by dint of changing the refraction of light in his own body's living cells, has made himself invisible.  Almost at once, he realizes that he hasn't prepared for the many bad things that can result by walking around without others noticing him...most immediately that traipsing around naked outside in England during cold times would have most assuredly give him a bad cold...which it does, burdening him with the embarrassment of continually giving away his presence to others with his sneezing.  But more than that, Griffin keeps almost comically going from one predicament to another...and his angry rage grows.  What he wants now, more than anything else, is to figure out how to restore his visibility...but  the circumstances in the culturally provincial small towns in southern England where he struggles confound him time and time again. These nosy people just won't respect his privacy (he has tried representing himself, completely clothed and bandaged, as someone recovering from wounds), and the growing suspicions among the people that he is responsible for a local burglary (which he is) increases the unwelcome scrutiny on him.  He becomes more and more emotionally unstable and resorts to physical violence against others, in particular against a vagrant named Tom Marvel with whom he has entrusted the task of carrying his crucial scientific notebooks and money.  Marvel flees with the goods, and the invisible man is now in a state of murderous rage after him. The story's violence escalates, and the protagonist "looks" more and more like the evil figure portrayed in the movie.  As a reader, I naturally try to empathize with the main character...which I was able to do to an extent at the first with this hapless invisible man.  But Griffin's personality is so self-centered as he rationalizes away his abhorrent behavior toward others that I quickly began to root against him...a troublesome predicament for a reader like me who is accustomed to pulling for the story's "hero".

As usual, I left out the ending to this novel so that you might pick it up and read it for yourself some day.  It gives a good picture of small-town England and its people at the end of the nineteenth century.  But more than that, The Invisible Man carries an unspoken warning about scientific ventures undertaken without considering all of the possible negative consequences...