The Time Machine

I was looking for HG Wells' The First Men in the Moon after watching the Mark Gatiss adaptation on BBC Four. It wasn't on the shelf at my local library but I did find The Time Machine, a book which I first read when I was about eight years old. I thought it would be worth another read with older eyes. I suppose the first thing that surprised me is how slight a volume it actually was. When I read it at eight years old it seemed like a weighty tome but the version from the library was a slim 115 pages long. The other interesting thing is to compare it to the film versions.

There have been two major film adaptations of The Time Machine. One in 1960 with Rod Taylor in the lead and the second in 2002 starring Guy Pearce. Having re-read the book it's interesting how close to the original text the 1960 film was - although with some interesting embellishments. The 2002 remake wasn't bad either, and was actually directed by HG Wells great-grandson, but it did take some surprising liberties with the original - rather like George Pal did with his 1953 War of the Worlds film - maybe he learnt that lesson when he came to direct The Time Machine?

As for the book, it's interesting how Wells tries to use scientific ideas in his story. He makes reference to four dimensional time and space some ten years before Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, but his concept of the lifespan and destiny of the sun still seems to be bedded to Lord Kelvin's predictions of a chemical furnace. They would need Einstein's theories to show how much potential energy the Sun really has at its disposal. However, the one scientific theory that pervades the book is that of evolution, bonded with Wells' own interest in socialist politics producing a horrific welding of the two. The chapters are nicely paced and quite episodic. I'm not sure whether this was to allow for magazine publication in the manner of Charles Dickens' major works but it frames each development of the plot well. I seem to recall that I struggled with the Victorian phrases when I first read this but it's actually fairly straight forward language. Maybe I've just read more Victorian literature since then.

I said that the 1960 film had some embellishments and these actually improve the story to my mind. The first, and most obvious, is that they actually give the Time Traveller a name: George. This is later revealed to be "H George Wells" which I thought was a nice touch. The second embellishment is that, as he travels forwards from the 19th century, we see the two world wars and a predicted third (in 1966 - possibly a warning from the film's producers). This hindsight adds to the believability of Well's steam-punk contraption. The film does miss out on the book's journey to the end of the world but the final additional touch is that, after the Time Traveller heads off back into the future, one of his friends notices that he has taken three books with him. We are not told which three books these are but it leaves the film on a rather philosophical note compared to the book.

Which three books would you have taken? If it was Desert Island Disks it would have been The Bible, The Complete Works of Shakespeare and AN Other. I'm wondering if this may have been what the film's producers had in mind; but if it was Wells himself I suspect that he would have taken Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Thomas More's Utopia - the ideal society that is no place.