An important book—in dire need of editing

This novel was enormously successful when it was published in 1916. The central character, Mr Britling—a very thinly disguised version of H G Wells himself—is a well-known writer enjoying an eccentric and comfortable existence living in a country house in Essex with his family, house-guests, and many visitors. Among his writings are regular leaders for The Times, and as the novel opens in the summer of 1914 he is contemplating a pamphlet on the Irish Home Rule question. Mr Britling generally views the world with amused detachment, real life only occasionally impinging on him like when he wrecks his new car having forgotten to insure it. The war changes all of that and he wants to ‘do his bit’, but:

“The war monster was not nearly so disposed to meet him as he was to meet the war ... its eyes were fixed on something beside and behind him [his son] ... the young are the food of war ...”

There follows an extensive critique of the conduct of the war, from the general unpreparedness of the country, the inability of officers at the front to read maps, the lamentable rate at which armaments are being produced, and the strategic wrong-headedness of the government. This is embellished with extensive letters from his seventeen-year-old son who is fighting in the trenches having lied about his age. Mr Britling’s criticism is not limited to the British side, describing in some detail outrages committed by Prussian militarists on combatants and civilians alike. But along with his frustrations is a growing feeling of impending doom regarding the fate of his son.

It seems to me that this novel has become highly relevant again today, having sinister and fascinating resonances with the world of 2024 given the various regional conflicts which, just like in 1914, threaten to engulf us all.

Unfortunately the narrator, Rayner Bourton, leaves a very great deal to be desired, and the narration goes quite some way to spoiling the impact of the book. He continually mispronounces words, not once or twice, but hundreds of times. It is like trying to enjoy a Beethoven symphony when a musician in the brass section plays a violently wrong note every few minutes or so. Time and again when reading quite ordinary English words in regular daily use he puts the emphasis on the wrong syllable. This could be regarded as an eccentric affectation, but he then pronounces ‘finite’ with the first syllable, ‘fin’ rhyming with ‘tin’, and there are many similar oddities. His inability to pronounce French or German words and names in a book about the First World War begs a very serious question about his suitability for the job. ‘Verdun’ he pronounces with the emphasis on the ‘Ver’, ‘Leitmotif’ becomes ‘leetmotif’, ‘Nietzsche’ becomes ‘Neech’, and his rendering of ‘Brest Litovsk’ defies transliteration. But the worst instances are words that just get mangled. ‘Motif’ becomes ‘motive’; words like ‘Massachusetts’, ‘unlikeliness’, ‘infinite’, ‘nuclear’, and my absolute favourite the ‘Lusitania’, which becomes the ‘Listiania’ are stumbled over as though the reader were drunk.

There are so many repetitions of these errors that it is clear than absolutely no editorial control has been applied. Furthermore, the engineers of this audiobook have divided a printed book of eleven chapters, some of which have up to twenty-five sections, into 487 ‘chapters’ having no correspondence with the sections, and frequently starting and ending in the middle of a section. This renders any sort of navigation to different parts of the novel virtually impossible.

This is a very shoddy production which is a pity, because I think that ‘Mr Britling...’ is an important book, and there are several occasions when Bourton’s voice and speaking style really come into their own, particularly during passages of emotional turmoil.

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