Review: The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll

The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll by H.G. Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An early Wells (1894), not SF but comedy. I picked it up because I was reading the Wikipedia article on Three Men in a Boat , which I read immediately prior, and it mentioned that this book was partly inspired by that book. Rather than a boat trip by three friends, this is a cycling trip by one man, Mr. Hoopdriver, a lowly draper's assistant, at the time when the affordable bicycle has newly granted geographical mobility to the common people, and before cars join bicycles on the roads.

What I found fascinating about it was how Wells seemed to write himself into it both as the hero and the villain. He had been an uneducated draper's assistant like Mr. Hoopdriver, but by a combination of hard work and seizing his opportunities had gained some education and become a teacher. He then, around the time this book was written, fell in love with one of his students, left his wife and lived with, and later married, this woman five years his junior. (He subsequently had many affairs while married to her.)

In this book, the hero is Hoopdriver, who has an innocent morality and the remnants of a religious upbringing, and helps a young woman disentangle herself from the clutches of the villain - an educated man in something of a mentor relationship with her, twice her age, who is married but wants to seduce her, having convinced her that she should leave her despised stepmother in his company. (They are also on bicycles, going in the same direction as Hoopdriver, and he keeps encountering them and gradually comes to understand the situation, eventually intervening.)

While the parallels aren't exact - the age gap is much greater in the novel, and the woman is unwilling, apparently unlike Wells' second wife - it does feel to me as if, perhaps, Wells was showing some regret for his actions in the light of what his younger self would have thought of them.

The other theme that interested me in the book centers around how the zeitgeist, or things we've read and imagined, can take the place of original thought. At the beginning, when we see Hoopdriver at work in the draper's shop, Wells points out how the phrases he uses to the customers are as automatic as the way he rolls up the cloth while thinking of something else. He has been reduced to a machine, and ironically it's a machine - his bicycle - that frees him and enables him to find self-determination and choices. He endures what would otherwise be an unendurable existence by fantasizing, using books he's read - mostly popular adventure novels - to cast himself as a hero, while living a completely mundane and unremarkable life, like a milder version of the later comic writer James Thurber's Walter Mitty. But when he does get the opportunity to act, this fantasizing has functioned as a kind of mental practice for being brave, decisive, and a "gentleman" - in his actions if not in his social position. Not only does he intervene to protect the Young Lady in Grey, but he (eventually) tells her the truth about who he is, something he finds much harder, but which he is compelled to do by his essential honesty and his regard for her.

The other side of the coin is seen in Jessie, the young woman, and her would-be seducer Bechamel. The narrator remarks of them that they are essentially hollow people with a shell formed out of the zeitgeist. Jessie, in particular, has (against her stepmother's wishes and without her knowledge) read her stepmother's novels, which are considered somewhat risque, though her stepmother is in fact entirely conventional apart from her literary affectations; this leads Jessie to a naïve determination to Live Her Own Life, something which was barely dawning as a possibility for women at the time and, as Jessie eventually realizes, required them to have money to start with. Here's the relevant passage:

"And when we open the heads of these two young people, we find, not a straightforward motive on the surface anywhere; we find, indeed, not a soul so much as an oversoul, a zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highway's feast of fine, confused thinking. The girl is resolute to Live Her Own Life, a phrase you may have heard before, and the man has a pretty perverted ambition to be a cynical artistic person of the very calmest description. He is hoping for the awakening of Passion in her, among other things. He knows Passion ought to awaken, from the text-books he has studied. He knows she admires his genius, but he is unaware that she does not admire his head. He is quite a distinguished art critic in London, and he met her at that celebrated lady novelist's, her stepmother, and here you have them well embarked upon the Adventure. Both are in the first stage of repentance, which consists, as you have probably found for yourself, in setting your teeth hard and saying 'I WILL go on.'"

Part of what makes this a comedy, and much of what makes it enjoyable to me, is that although the narrator makes it clear that the characters are practicing a great deal of self-deceit and taking most or all of their ideas unexamined from other people, he also normalizes this as something that everyone does in order to deal with life. He treats mundane, unremarkable, forgettable Mr. Hoopdriver sympathetically; Hoopdriver may have been made into a machine by society, but the narrator deals with him as a human being with worth and dignity, despite his mild delusions of self-importance. He's an everyman hero, which is a kind of hero I particularly enjoy (I'm so sick of Chosen Ones). In the final chapter, Wells makes it explicit that making such a man sympathetic is his goal:

"But if you see how a mere counter-jumper, a cad on castors, and a fool to boot, may come to feel the little insufficiencies of life, and if he has to any extent won your sympathies, my end is attained."

The book isn't without its minor flaws. There are a few inconsistencies in the ages of the characters, for example. Chapter XV describes Jessie as a girl of 18, but everywhere else in the book says she's 17; it also describes Bechamel as 33 or 34, but Jessie says 35 elsewhere, and he doesn't contradict her. Jessie's stepmother is described as only 10 years older than Jessie, but then a couple of pages later her age is given as 32, which is 15 years older. Hoopdriver's age is consistently given as 23. (Wells was 28 in 1894, for context.) The Project Gutenberg edition also contains some coordinate commas that don't belong (probably original) and some obvious uncorrected scan errors that I will pass on to them for correction.

These small issues are thoroughly outweighed by the masterful way in which Wells takes a man who seems to have no potential as a hero whatsoever and shows how, by his basic decency and honesty, he becomes one, if only in a small way. As in most comedies, it's entirely populated by foolish characters. Hoopdriver is a self-deceiving fool who thinks others think more of him than they do; Jessie is a naïve fool who has no idea how the world works and doesn't even realize that; Bechamel is an egotistical fool who thinks his lust for Jessie is love, and that it justifies forcing himself on her; the stepmother is a hypocritical fool who writes novels in which women are unconventional while being thoroughly conventional herself; her male friends are an officious fool, a pompous fool, and a callow fool; the clergyman they recruit along the way is a narrow-minded fool. But as with, say, Joseph Andrews , the portrayal of their foolishness is often not cutting and condemning, but affectionate and understanding, especially when it comes to Hoopdriver (and, to a lesser extent, Jessie). It's not a dark comedy; although, for reasons of realism, the ending isn't the traditional lovers-united comedy ending, it holds out a good deal of hope. And while it's class-conscious in the way that only an English novel can be, and especially an English novel written by a Cockney man born to an unsuccessful shopkeeper who has nevertheless managed to gain an education, by that same token it's hopeful about social mobility, while never denying the power and weight of the class system. As Wells' career went on, he became more cynical and strident about these issues, but here he is neither of those things, gently but firmly bringing class into prominence as a theme of the novel without overstressing it or allowing it to push the characters out of the foreground.

Structurally, it's in some ways a picaresque, again like Joseph Andrews , one of those English comic novels that wanders around a good deal rather than having a particularly strong plot structure, and what structure it has is partly provided by the physical journey (as with its model, Three Men in a Boat ). But there is also a strong character arc for Hoopdriver, which follows his relationship with Jessie, from not knowing she exists at the beginning through spotting her at a distance to meeting her, rescuing her, travelling with her and getting to know her, and separating from her at last, but with some promise of eventually reuniting, when they will have become different people with different options available to them.

I went into it with some trepidation, having not always enjoyed Wells' other novels, mainly because they're not like this one. But in the end, it turned out to be one of the best books I've read this year.

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