Book Freak #265 — Deep Cut Edition

Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928) is the late, nearly-forgotten H. G. Wells novel that he called his own Candide. A comfortable Englishman is betrayed, breaks down, and washes up among the cannibals of Rampole Island, where a giant prehistoric ground sloth still lumbers through the gorges and nothing is what it seems. It is the first Deep Cut I’ve turned into a full Book Freak Edition for the new reading club, and you can download the ebook below.

Most people have heard of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Almost nobody has heard of Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island. I stumbled on it in the early 2000s, when I was on a reading jag about people getting stranded on deserted islands.

Published in 1928, Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island was the 38th of the 52 novels Wells wrote. His first was The Time Machine (1895); his last was You Can’t Be Too Careful, published in 1941, five years before his death.

It’s narrated in the first person by Arnold Blettsworthy, a wide-eyed optimist whose faith in a decent, orderly world collapses when he finds his best friend and his fiancee in bed together. To clear his head, Blettsworthy sets off on an ocean voyage around the world, and ends up cast away on “Rampole Island,” a place of savages that turns out to be a mirror held up to civilization itself.

The book is part castaway adventure, part social satire, and part something stranger and more inward. As Blettsworthy himself puts it, “the story I have to tell is at its core a mental case.” Wells is exploring a single disordered mind rather than a distant planet, an early experiment in what later science fiction would call “inner space.”

It didn’t sell well. Wells’s biographer David Smith calls it one of his “least read books.” But the reviews were warm. A 1928 notice in *TIME*, headlined “Sacred Lunatic,” called it “an eminently good yarn packed with humor, humanity.” Wells’s friend the historian Eileen Power thought it “absolutely first class.” Later judgments were kinder still: Everett Bleiler, surveying early science fiction, called it “a very interesting, well-accomplished book.”

Core Principles

We are raised on false assurances

Adrift on a sinking derelict, certain he is about to drown, Blettsworthy works out where his optimism came from. “To keep us quiet when we are children, and to make us nice and good and confident, we are given all sorts of assurances about life for which there are no justifications, and by the time we have found them out we are already too far off from human things to expose the deception.”

The savage island is a mirror

Rampole Island looks at first like pure adventure-story exotica: cannibals, war drums, a soothsayer, sheer cliffs. The longer Blettsworthy lives there, the more its cruelties start to rhyme with the civilization he came from. The islanders justify their savagery with elaborate ritual and high-sounding talk, exactly the way respectable people do. By the time you reach the end, you understand that the island was never as far from London or New York as it pretended to be.

The dreary megatheria

The giant sloths are huge, filthy, slow beasts that are protected by the people who half-worship and half-fear them. They represent dogmatic thinking and old hatreds that are kept alive because nobody can imagine the world without them.

You can be disillusioned and still choose to go on

Blettsworthy loses his comfortable optimism (and a good deal more). But he finds a smaller, tougher, clearer-eyed willingness to keep living and keep loving. Wells, who had every reason in 1928 to write a bitter book (his wife died a year earlier), wrote a humane one instead. .

Try It Now

1. Write down one “assurance about life” you were handed as a child (hard work always pays off, good people get their reward, the system is basically fair). Then write down one time reality contradicted it.
2. Find one of your own megatheria: a habit, a grudge, a tradition, an opinion you keep alive for no good reason. Ask what it would cost to let it finally go extinct.
3. Read forty pages of Mr. Blettsworthy this week and share your thought in the discussion thread below.

Quote

“The abnormal is only the normal disproportioned.”

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Download the Book Freak Edition

This is the first featured pick of the Deep Cuts Reading Club, the new paid-subscriber benefit. Every month I take a forgotten public-domain book and make a a clean ebook in EPUB and PDF.

Your copy of Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island is linked below — grab the EPUB for your phone or e-reader, or the PDF to read anywhere...

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