Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

"Tono-Bungay" is a novel written by H. G. Wells and published in 1909. It has been called "arguably his most artistic book." As for Wells himself he considered "Tono-Bungay as the finest and most finished novel upon the accepted lines" that he had "written or was ever likely to write." While reading the novel I also read a biography of Wells and found many interesting things about the author.

Although Wells was a prolific writer in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, and social commentary, he is now best remembered for his science fiction novels. His most famous science fiction works include "The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man." He has been called the father of science fiction, of course other authors have also been called the father of science fiction, so I guess we all get to pick whoever we want for the title. As to "Tono-Bungay", I've read at other places, including the introduction to my copy of the book that it is a "realist satire on consumer capitalism and a commentary on social injustice", but since these are terms that sound nothing like something I would say and I would never use, I won't use them here either, I will simply take the writer of the introduction's word for it.

In 1874 when just a young boy he had an accident that left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he started reading books from the local library. He soon became fascinated with the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; and they stimulated his desire to write. Wells spent three very unhappy years as an apprentice to a draper, he also worked as a pupil-teacher at a school in Somerset and again apprenticed for a chemist in Midhurst. Wells studied biology at the Normal School of Science earning a bachelor of science and doctor of science degrees. I wonder who decided to name the school the "Normal" School of Science. I'll have to go see if there is an abnormal school of science somewhere when I'm done with this. His first writings were short stories and articles published in journals.

Now I'm moving on to what I thought was the most interesting and puzzling thing about his life. He first married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells in 1891, they divorced in 1894 after Wells fell in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he married in 1895. For some reason that I don't know he called her Jane. Ok, here's the puzzling thing, with his wife Jane's consent, Wells had affairs with a number of women, including the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger, adventurer and writer Odette Keun and novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. He had a daughter with the writer Amber Reeves; and in 1914, a son, by the novelist Rebecca West. What I have a hard time figuring out is why in the world his wife gave her consent to this. Oh well, I'll probably never know so I will give up on pondering the subject and move on to "Tono-Bungay".

Our main character and narrator of the story is George Ponderevo, the son of the housekeeper at a great estate called Bladesover. When as a boy he has a fist fight with a young aristocrat he is sent by his mother, first to her cousin Nicodemus Frapp, and after he runs away from there, he is sent as a fully indentured apprentice, to his uncle Edward Ponderevo. Uncle Edward dreams of making it big, and after years of failure he succeeds with his patent medicine he names "Tono-Bungay".Uncle Edward is bottling a sham tonic, it is completely devoid of any actual medicinal benefit, but he is advertising it with a flair and succeeding very well. Edward is a genius at marketing, Tono-Bungay advertisements are everywhere. On billboards all over the city of London, newspaper advertisements and posters. And as the advertisements tell us Tono-Bungay could do just about anything. Eventually we have:

"Tono-Bungay Hair Stimulant"

"Concentrated Tono-Bungay" for the eyes

"Tono-Bungay Lozenges"

"Tono-Bungay Chocolate." "You can GO for twenty-four hours,"the ad tells us, "on Tono-Bungay Chocolate."

and finally, Tono-Bungay Mouthwash. "You are Young Yet, but are you Sure Nothing has Aged your Gums?"

And so Tono-Bungay grows and grows and Uncle Edward gets richer and richer. However, like all businesses that grow and grow eventually it stops, at least that's how business seems to me. Except maybe McDonalds come to think of it. I'll have to give some thought to see if I come up with any other businesses that just grow and grow and never stop growing.

Now skipping over what happens to Tono-Bungay, whether it keeps growing and has now taken over the world, you will have to find out for yourself, I am moving on to quap, yes quap. Somewhere in the middle of the novel an explorer named Gordon-Nasmyth appears in the Tono-Bungay offices telling a strange story about a substance called quap, “the most radio-active stuff in the world.� Now if I found the most radio-active stuff in the world my first move wouldn't be to run to a company that makes medicine, even if it is fake medicine, but that's what Gordon-Nasmyth does and uncle Edward and George both seem to be interested. Godon-Nasmyth tells them this about quap, yes quap.:

"I'm sorry I came. But, still, now I'm here.... And first as to quap; quap, sir, is the most radio-active stuff in the world. That's quap! It's a festering mass of earths and heavy metals, polonium, radium, ythorium, thorium, carium, and new things, too. There's a stuff called Xk—provisionally. There they are, mucked up together in a sort of rotting sand. What it is, how it got made, I don't know. It's like as if some young creator had been playing about there. There it lies in two heaps, one small, one great, and the world for miles about it is blasted and scorched and dead. You can have it for the getting. You've got to take it—that's all!"

He then shows them a sample telling them:

"Don't carry it about on you," said Gordon-Nasmyth. "It makes a sore."

As for where you get this stuff in the first place:

"....within the thunderbelt of Atlantic surf, of the dense tangled vegetation that creeps into the shimmering water with root and sucker. He gave a sense of heat and a perpetual reek of vegetable decay, and told how at last comes a break among these things, an arena fringed with bone-white dead trees, a sight of the hard-blue sea line beyond the dazzling surf and a wide desolation of dirty shingle and mud, bleached and scarred.... A little way off among charred dead weeds stands the abandoned station,—abandoned because every man who stayed two months at that station stayed to die, eaten up mysteriously like a leper with its dismantled sheds and its decaying pier of wormrotten and oblique piles and planks, still insecurely possible. "

I can't quite remember why anyone would actually want to touch this stuff, or carry it around, or turn into a leper getting it among the dead trees, or buy it for that matter, but as I said they do seem interested and it does take the book in another direction, at least for awhile anyway. Now why I am mentioning quap other than it is an interesting though creepy section of the book, is because I decided to look up the word - like I usually do - and was actually surprised to find there was a definition for it. Here's the first definition:

"a hypothetical nuclear particle consisting of a quark and an antiproton"

There wasn't too much in this definition that made sense to me so I looked up the words quark and antiproton, and as I suspected would happen, after reading the first line or two I just gave up and moved on. So I am now done with the quap, whether anyone is stupid enough to go get this stuff I'm not telling. In fact, I'm about done telling anything as far as the story goes. There are love affairs, marriages, divorces, deaths, and lots about aeronautical experiments with gliders and balloons. There's even a flight and I do mean flight from the authorities.

As for the actual word or words, I don't know which, I have been trying to figure out since I picked up the book what "Tono-Bungay" is. I could say it is the title of a book. No kidding. I could say it is a "patent medicine" that is just a sham, no kidding. But what is Tono-Bungay? I never found a clear answer. From what I've read the name is a play on words. It has been suggested it stands for "ton of bunk" -- but other possibilities are "tonic bunk", or even "tonic Ben-gay." Regardless of what it stands for, it is clear that Tono Bungay is not entirely good for you, and certainly does nothing to help you in the long run. I'm having trouble believing the tonic Ben-gay one because the only Bengay I know is that cream you buy at the drug store that is supposed to temporarily relieve muscle and joint pain, backaches; stuff like that, and I don't think it was around when the book was written, but of course, I'll have to go look it up.

I liked the book. I read at several different places that Wells with "Tono-Bungay":

"is able to claim a permanent place in English fiction, close to Dickens because of the extraordinary humanity of some of his characters, but also because of his ability to invoke a place, a class, a social scene."

I liked the book alot, but for me anyway, it's not Dickens at all. Read it for yourself and see what you think.