The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

I won’t deny the fact that at one point in my childhood, I wanted to become invisible. It wasn’t the top priority in my list of “I hope one day I’d suddenly have this super power”, but it was still there, probably at number 6 lagging behind Wolverine’s Claws, flying, super strength, teleportation, and Johnny Storm’s powers. I haven’t thought of the consequences of being invisible then because I didn’t contemplate on things that much when I was a child. I mean, who would do that?

This 160 or so page novel by Wells was a mixture of contemporary, sci-fi, and crime. Some of my favorite genres mixed up to form this not so bad classic. I’m not sure what Wells wanted to portray in this novel other than being invisible has a lot of consequences. Or maybe that doing evil experiments on yourself would only bring harm to oneself. I was expecting to hate this, because I’ve recently put aside some classics because they were so damn boring. Im sure it’s all on the reading slump, but I’m a bit shocked that I didn’t have problems with the writing.

The Invisible Man was a novel about an invisible man’s struggle to live in a world of transparency. It was hard because people weren’t open minded then, so anything out of the ordinary would mean extermination. He wanted to become invisible, so he had to live with the consequences. There were a lot of cool things Wells tacked on. Like how the food that he eats are visible unless digested completely, and when he smoked the cigar it was also visible. He could’ve pulled off a bank heist with only a bit of difficulty, but staying truly invisible was still a pain in the ass.

I didn’t like much of the characters in the first part of the novel. Mr. Marvel was annoying, and so were the landlord and Halls. Kemp was a lot better though, and the main character himself was not that bad. I would say though that the plot was better than the characters. They were just right, but none amazed me, unfortunately.

It would be redundant for me to keep reminding everyone why it took me 5 days to finish this really short novel. I know i’m probably the last one to finish this, but I’m glad it didn’t take me a week to do so. I might not be a quick buddy reader for the next few months(another advance notice), but I’m one to finish something that i started. I will be faster in December, but January onwards would mean the second semester, so the turtle shall prevail once again.

3.5/5 stars. One of the few classics that I enjoyed, but I can suggest better ones. I will be reading more from Wells in the future, but for now let’s see what my buddy readers will choose for next month’s read.