Dare I say that 'The Invisible Man' by H.G. Wells is the best novel I have ever read? Literary dons would shake their heads. Yes, it't true that I couldn't go past the first chapters of 'The Magic Mountain' without feeling this enormous weight coming on that was a combination of boredom with a certain sense of duty that somehow it would be beneficial to carry on. The boredom was due to a vague feeling that I was not really interested in the fate of an exceedingly dull fellow named Hans Castorp and the intolerably self centred characters that he finds himself with at the hilltop clinic in Switzerland. The sense of obligation came from my self estimation as an intellectual and a mysterious conviction that this gives that certain 'big' novels must be read perforce. On analysis, since literary criticism is not my work, it is evident that the only practical motive for such a conviction is the chance of making some meaty remarks at a dinner party and thus impressing others of my superior intellect. In any case, none of the peripheral motivations for reading really matters. All each literay work is relevant only to itself. I have also tried getting into Dostoyevsky whose work is attributed with containing deep thoughts and analysis of the human soul. I started reading 'The Idiot', 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Devils', but I found the similar disinterest that I found in Thomas Mann and the build up of boredom in the reading impossible to overcome. So I confess that despite my own claims to being interested in literature, I have not mastered the so called 'standard works'.

So what was different about 'The Invisible Man'?

For a start it gets you in. The characters are real, that is, they seem to be people like you and me. How does a writer do this? He does it by being unforgiving. That is, he does not present human character as aspiring to be cleansed. He acknowledges an obsession. He acknowledges a yearning for greater powers. As a literary theme, he mirrors the Shakespearean will to be free of the yokes and shackles of bodily life. He takes the physical possibilities to its limit - to be 'invisible'. The hero's downfall is not presented in any way as a philosophical dissertaion, as something that writers like Dostoyevsky or Mann can't resist inserting. Instead we are given vivid descriptions of his desperate bid to survive in its most elemental sense after the euphoria of scientific discovery fades in the face of practicalities. The cruelty of the hero's actions are described with such a precise sense of normality that we accept the atrocities as being understandable, certainly inevitable, perhaps even necessary for anyone who finds himself in his circumstances. The writer thus allows the reader to create his own moral conumdrums on behalf of the protagonist as the story unfolds. Even in the end, the writer executes the sentence but he is not the judge.

I read the book in a swoop one afternoon and I applauded its author. All sorts of visions about the paradoxes and comicity of existence had passed through my mind in a few hours of complete fascination. It was easy and making it so, I think, is the purpose of artistic genius.