"We had no idea what Volts had been, but the notion of danger, however far away and long ago, was exciting. This identifies the human environment as being apparently without electricity. Once a year the clockman came from Winchester, on an old jogging pack horse, to clean and oil it and put it right." - p 1 It stood on the mantlepiece in the parlor, and every night before he went to bed he took the key from a vase and wound it up. "Apart from the one in the church tower, there were five clocks in the village that kept reasonable time, and my father owned one of them. The 1st chapter is called "Capping Day", the meaning of wch is to become clear over time, the reader is just left to deduce that Capping Day is a sort of coming-of-age ceremony time. It even seems to be targetted to a young adult readership, a demographic I generally avoid. The White Mountains fits right in, this is even the 1st book of a trilogy, like the The Lord of the Rings (but not as epic) & Gormenghast (another epic favorite), it's British & the setting is rural.
What can I say? I'm a sucker for such a narrative, one so basic to my own ethical core. In other words, within a somewhat placid setting, some more or less honest simple folks are confronted w/ a hero's task & perform it staying true to their integrity &/or improving as a result of their hero's journey. Tolkein's The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings trilogy & other things I was reading at the time did roughly the same thing in other genres. The point relevant to this review being that Wells established a mood of what one might call British 'pastoral' SciFi that I was very fond of. I was already a nudist so it just appealed to me that Wells was too.
I probably got that picture by picking it up at the side of a rural road where I lived, presumably left there torn out of a magazine, by a pervert possibly hoping to get somebody or another worked up. was wearing light-colored socks (probably white but the picture was black & white so I don't know) & sandals. I've also mentioned that as a young teenager I had a picture of Wells & spouse sitting naked on the back porch of a cabin, presumably at a nudist camp. His The Time Machine was particularly important but so was his The War of the Worlds. I've mentioned before that H.G.Wells was an important writer to me as a young'un. By tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 30, 2020
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