H. G. Wells and writing about plot

I had not really planned to write more about H. G. Wells, and tomorrow I will move on to an even duller writer, but I thought of something I want to say about the plots of the Wells novels.

Plots are information delivery systems.  Wells has cooked up a mixture of ideas, images, set pieces, cool things, and, potentially, at least, characters.  He needs to arrange them in a sensible manner.  With The War of the Worlds, a number of steps are pretty well fixed by the choice of story.  The Martians arrive, spread, are resisted, defeat the resistance.  These two steps can be repeated as long as the writer thinks the reader can stand it, although the scale of the threat and the ingenuity of the resistance have to ratchet up each time.  Wells really only does this twice.  Two more steps: victory belongs to the Martians!  Or not!

But the problems have only multiplied.  How does Well describe each of these steps?  Does he tell the story as if he is floating in the air, going wherever he wants?  Is he a historian, retrospectively assembling imaginary sources?  How about an eyewitness account?  Wells chooses the latter, which allows a lot of immediacy and surprise, but creates new dilemmas.

The narrator is present at the point of invasion, and presumably survives long enough to write up his account – in fact, Wells tells us on the third page that the “storm burst upon us six years ago now,” so we know the narrator will give us a complete story.  No “and as I pen these last words, they come for me” and ominous final sentence fragment.

How likely is it that one person observes all of the steps of the story?  Not too likely, so Wells has to bend a bit.  In particular, Wells wants to see how the invasion looks from London, leading to the great “Exodus from London” chapter.  He switches to the narrator’s brother, or, really, the narrator switches to tell us what happened to his brother.  He also, as he sees fit, refers to newspapers and some “as we now know” information.  Wells also drops the narrator into one extraordinarily unlikely coincidence which gives him some privileged information, and explains why he, of all people, is writing this particular book.

Some features of the plot make Wells’s life easier.  Characters, fleeing the Martians, wander the countryside, allowing Wells to have his narrator meet anyone he wants.  The reader won’t mind the coincidence – any encounter is coincidence.

I could repeat the same exercise with the efficient The Island of Dr. Moreau.  In the two and a half pages of the first chapter, we have a shipwreck, the threat of cannibalism, and the delivery of one piece of mysterious information, “a disconnected impression of a dark face with extraordinary eyes close to mine.”  No island yet, and no doctor, but Wells lets us know how we’re going to get to them, and gives us just one little clue about what to expect when we get there.

Readers, bloggers, often claim to care a lot about plot, even to read for plot.  I never quite believe them, because they so rarely write about plot, meaning the decisions a writer makes about plotting, which decisions are better and worse, what the consequences are.  Book bloggers write about characters, mostly; book groups discuss characters.  The creation of plausible imaginary people who we can get to know in a uniquely intimate way is the greatest achievement of prose fiction, so this is as it should be.  Plots give those characters something to do. 

Except in, for example, science fiction novels by H. G. Wells, where the characters are simply useful cogs in the plot machine.  The three Wells books I have read all feature nearly identical narrators, dullish fellows.   Dull first-person narrators result in occasional dull passages.  Or do the dull passages result in dull narrators?   Perhaps, in the kind of wild stories Wells writes, a dull narrator is a necessity.  I mean, the dang Martians are invading!  What more do I want?