Tono Bungay

Publisher Marketing: Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than "character actors." They have a class, they have a place, they know what is becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacks-the unjustifiable gifts of footmen-in pantries, and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and-to go to my other extreme-I was once-oh, glittering days!-an item in the house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I've seen these people at various angles. At the dinner-table I've met not simply the titled but the great. On one occasion-it is my brightest memory-I upset my champagne over the trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire-Heaven forbid I should be so invidious as to name him!-in the warmth of our mutual admiration. Review Citations: Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2006 pg. 971 (EAN 9780141441115, Paperback) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2010 pg. 976 (EAN 9780141441115, Paperback) Contributor Bio:  Wells, H G Herbert George Wells's (1866-1946) career as an author was fostered by a childhood mishap. He broke his leg and spent his convalescence reading every book he could find. Wells earned a scholarship at the Norman School of Science in London. Wells's ""science fiction"" (although he never called it such) was influenced by his interest in biology. H. G. Wells gained fame with his first novel, ""The Time Machine (1895)."" He followed this with ""The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), "" and ""The War Of The Worlds (1898).""