David Lodge’s “A Man of Parts,” reviewed by Michael Dirda

HG. Wells’s life (1866-1946) has always read like a novel. And now it is one. Or is it?

David Lodge’s “A Man of Parts” hews closely to all the known facts about Wells, derives much of its dialogue from his letters and memoirs and includes no made-up characters.

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( LIBRARY OF CONGRESS / ) - H.G. Wells

The book also draws many details from the numerous secondary works devoted to Wells and his distinguished contemporaries. After all, the author of “The Time Machine” and “The War of the Worlds” — not to overlook “Tono-Bungay” and “The Outline of History” — knew Henry James, Arnold Bennett, Bernard Shaw, Ford Madox Ford, the children’s author E. Nesbit, all the movers and shakers of the Fabian socialists, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and many, many others.

He also slept with an astonishing number of women, including some noted writers (Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson), at least one Cambridge undergraduate, the daughters of friends, a possible Russian spy (Moura Budberg), a black Washington prostitute named Martha, birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and, according to his own calculations, perhaps 100 other women. Why? Or, perhaps, why not?

“A Man of Parts” explores, with great verve, Wells’s lifelong attempt to honor his own complexity, to be true to himself as a sexual being, a loving family man, a creative artist and an ambitious social thinker.

Long ago, Lodge made his reputation with “Changing Places,” “Small World” and “Nice Work,” widely praised satires of academic life. Yet, for all their laughs, these books were, in a way, “condition of England” novels, rich in reflections on the way we live now and regularly depicting the undercutting of dreams by reality. In “A Man of Parts” we again see a protagonist who tries to make his ideals — artistic, erotic and societal — come true, seems to succeed for a while and then finds everything falling apart.

But there’s a difference between this new book and the older ones. In “Small World” Professor Morris Zapp was generally thought to be closely based on the well known academic Stanley Fish. When A.S. Byatt brought out “The Children’s Book” — set among many of the same people as “A Man of Parts” — she called her E. Nesbit character Olive Wellwood. But here H.G. Wells really is H.G. Wells and E. Nesbit is E. Nesbit. What lies behind this decision to ignore the usual boundaries dividing fact from fancy?

In most historical novels, a fictional character acts against the background of, say, the French Revolution or the Indian Mutiny. Think of Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s “The Scarlet Pimpernel” or George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman in the Great Game.” This is the model established by Walter Scott, and it allows the novelist a kind of imaginative breathing space. The character can think and act with relative freedom, unlike the historical figures who are, more or less, straitjacketed by the established facts of their famous lives.

There is another, trickier model, however. Sometimes, the biographical record is so rich and full that a novelist will risk impersonating a figure from the past. Think now of Robert Graves’s “I, Claudius,” which reads, quite convincingly, like the actual memoirs of the Roman emperor. In “A Man of Parts,” Lodge writes in this other, more difficult tradition and succeeds brilliantly.