Other People's Lives

Finished A Man of Parts this evening realising that my claim from yesterday to have read half Wells's novels was incorrect. It seems he wrote quite a number of not very good ones in his last twenty-five years or so, a detail that adds considerably to the sense of melancholy induced by the final sections of Lodge's novel. I reckon I've probably read only a quarter of his fictions, and I don't intend to increase that fraction any time soon.
 
Having said that I suddenly recalled last night that in reading some of his work, some years back, specifically Kipps, I think, and definitely The New Machiavelli, I was somewhat excited to find parallels to Jung's idea of the two kinds of self as outlined in his autobiography. At the time I assumed this was just a coincidence, for some reason thinking that Wells would not have been cognisant of the work of the great psychoanalyst, but now I wonder. There's a fleeting reference to Jung in Lodge's novel that suggests Wells knew of his work and ideas, particularly the idea of the Shadow, but no more than that, unfortunately. I wonder how far Wells was consciously following a Jungian conception of personality when writing those novels.

But it's enough of H.G. for now, and possibly for always. The thing is, though, that whilst I've got a pile of recently acquired books that I've got to read there isn't a novel amongst them. So I'm now trying to make up my mind as to whether I should go with a biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (the one by his missus) or a biography of Bob Dylan to fulfil my need for story. (I've still got a long way to go in Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature, so that's my non-fictional supplement for the moment.)