H. G. Wells’s ‘Theological Excursion’ and the Dialogue Novel

Chapter 2 presents H. G. Wells as the most famous case of a lapsed unbeliever in the interwar period and explores the impact of Wells’s ‘theological excursion’ on his wartime fiction. Wells conceived of an idiosyncratic version of ‘God’ that might explain, and offer consolation for, the existence of evil as seen in what would become its characteristic twentieth-century form in the First World War. Wells presented his theology in books of philosophy and novels which quickly became a target for Rationalist derision and ire. Wells responded in kind, answering his critics in letters to the Rationalist press and even including the most famous of his opponents as a character in The Undying Fire (1919). This chapter suggests that Wells’s argument with Rationalism gave direction and purpose to his literary experiments at this time. In Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and The Soul of a Bishop (1917) he moved decisively away from the example set by modernist fiction to a ‘spread-out’ form capable of addressing the paradox of evil. In The Undying Fire, he thought he had perfected both his fictional method and his theodicy. Described by Wells as a frank rewrite of the Book of Job, the novel presents Wells’s minimal theology in a form that no one could mistake for modernism.