The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another classic from H G Wells, one of the best fiction writers, in earlier days.

Storyline: The book starts with a stranger (Griffin) lodging at downtown slum area with lot of mysterious luggage and apparatus. Soon, he attracts attention of the visitors to the lodge and the caretaker investigates the strange activities of this man. To everyone’s surprise, this stranger one day reveals his true identity by stripping off his clothes in public. He is invisible to the common eye. From then on, he strikes bad luck by undergoing a series of difficulties of remaining invisible, until he comes across his old school friend Dr Kemp. He reveals his true identity to Dr Kemp, as to how he passed out of his school and went on to pursue his interest in physics. His passion for research into invisibility by bringing down the refractive index of objects and equaling it to that of air, thus making the object invisible to the naked eye. He applies his body to this experiment and one day suddenly finds himself invisible. But, his intention of using his invisibility for bad means like creating terror in the township and to rule and loot them makes Dr Kemp inform the police. Griffin, after a long struggle in an attempt to kill Dr Kemp for betrayal, gets caught by a clever plot of Kemp and gets killed while he was still in his state of invisibility. His invisibility vanishes and his real body appears back, once he is dead.

Positives: A beautiful bed time story of horror, clubbed with science fiction. The author has a great knack in creating meaningful fiction, filled with scientific innovations, like in all his other books. A real page turner and must read by all fiction lovers. The process of invisibility explained clearly in scientific terms with a moral attached to the story. The moral says as to whatever might a man achieve through his intellect and skill, if that achievement is used for unfair purposes against the mankind, the invention or innovation would go waste and hence die its natural death.

Negatives: The modern reader might find the story very primitive and simple, but one should appreciate the author’s insight into science fiction, when very few thought about writing it, in those days. The story ends abruptly with a simple death of the Invisible Man and the reader is left wondering what happened next to the great invention.

My rating is 4 out of 5


View all my reviews