First Flight
Although the “realism” involved quickly becomes laughable (it was published barely half a decade after the Wright Brothers took to the air in Kitty Hawk), the narrator’s deep dive into the early conceptualization of aviation becomes an extremely important aspect of the story as it develops. While some mechanics of flight definitely date the story, the imagery remains vivid and illustrative of the period:
“I had begun with a glider that I imagined was on the lines of the Wright brothers’ aeroplane, but I could not be sure. It might turn over. I might upset it. It might burrow its nose at the end and smash itself and me. The conditions of the flight necessitated alert attention; it wasn’t a thing to be done by jumping off and shutting one’s eyes or getting angry or drunk to do it. One had to use one’s weight to balance. And when at last I did it it was horrible—for ten seconds. For ten seconds or so, as I swept down the air flattened on my infernal framework and with the wind in my eyes, the rush of the ground beneath me filled me with sick and helpless terror; I felt as though some violent oscillatory current was throbbing in brain and back bone, and I groaned aloud."
Eyes Wide Shut
The bulk of the narrative—the titular threadline of the plot—is related to the protagonist’s indulgence of a get-quick-scheme involving patent medicine that he knows to be a scam. Patent medicine would come to more popularly be referred to as “snake oil” because of claims that extracts from snakes comprised the ingredients. These claims actually make the term doubly ironic since not only did this “snake oil” have no medicinal benefits, but most did not any ingredient remotely associated with snakes:
“You know, from first to last, I saw the business with my eyes open, I saw its ethical and moral values quite clearly. Never for a moment do I remember myself faltering from my persuasion that the sale of Tono-Bungay was a thoroughly dishonest proceeding. The stuff was, I perceived, a mischievous trash, slightly stimulating, aromatic and attractive, likely to become a bad habit and train people in the habitual use of stronger tonics and insidiously dangerous to people with defective kidneys. It would cost about sevenpence the large bottle to make, including bottling, and we were to sell it at half a crown plus the cost of the patent medicine stamp. A thing that I will confess deterred me from the outset far more than the sense of dishonesty in this affair, was the supreme silliness of the whole concern.”
Welcome to London
Much of the action takes place in London. Suffice to say that it does not come across as the wondrous city portrayed in much Victorian and post-Victorian fiction. At the same time, however, it is not exactly the hellish inferno that is portrayed in the darker portraits of the same period. It is just a city; a big, crowded, dirty city at the height of the unregulated Industrial Age:
“I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway…congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into tenements; I marveled more and more at this boundless world of dingy people; whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing, drifted into the carriage; the sky darkened, I rumbled thunderously over bridges, van-crowded streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with an abrupt eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of grey water, barge crowded, of broad banks of indescribable mud, and then I was in Cannon Street Station—a monstrous dirty cavern with trains packed across its vast floor and more porters standing along the platform than I had ever been in my life before.”
Radio-Activity
Towards the end of the book, readers find themselves face-to-face with something almost certainly not expected. Suddenly, the narrator is discussing radioactivity which had only been discovered to exist a little more than a decade before the published by Henry Becquerel in what is often termed one of the most significant “accidental” scientific discoveries in history. If his descriptions of early aviation seem hopelessly archaic, the same cannot be said of his prescient vision of metaphorical implications of radioactive poisoning:
“To my mind radio-activity is a real disease of matter. Moreover, it is a contagious disease. It spreads. You bring those debased and crumbling atoms near others and those too presently catch the trick of swinging themselves out of coherent existence. It is in matter exactly what the decay of our old culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured reactions. When I think of these inexplicable dissolvent centres that have come into being in our globe—these quap heaps are surely by far the largest that have yet been found in the world; the rest as yet mere specks in grains and crystals—I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry-rotting and dispersal of all our world.”
