The Young H. G. Wells
Claire Tomalin Viking £20
Rating: 
H. G. Wells was the best at predicting the 21st century. Wells, who was only 18 when Queen Victoria died, wrote books about the men and women on the Moon, environmental disasters, racism, and Martians invading Earth.
Amazing is the fact that this was done in the form pages turning bestsellers (The War Of The Worlds, The Time Machine).
This feat is made even more remarkable by the fact that Wells came from a poor working class family. While he was recovering from life-threatening lung infection, his education was very limited. He learned how to read in bed and developed a solid foundation for himself.
Wells wrote bestselling page-turners including The War Of The Worlds and The Time Machine (Yvette Mimieux, above, is attacked by a Morlock in the 1960 film of The Time Machine)
In this brilliantly engaging story of the first 40 years of Wells’s life, Claire Tomalin cannot hide her admiration for a man who never forgot what it felt like to be hungry.
Although he had accumulated a lot of wealth via his books, tours and publications, he was still a passionate socialist who believed no country could be called civilized while any one of its citizens lived in poverty.
Wells wasn’t an angel, though, and Tomalin makes no excuse for the careless way with women. His 20s were his virgin years. However, that was because he was married to his cousin and refused to do more than a simple kiss.
Wells began an affair shortly after a terrible wedding. Isabel was a very scandalous bride at the time. Wells divorced Isabel and married again, launching himself into a number of sexual adventures.
Today he would probably be called a ‘sex addict’, although Tomalin makes the point that his attitude to ‘free love’ anticipated the permissive 1960s.
Later conquests included Rebecca West (the feminist novelist), by whom he had an unborn son.
But Tomalin is far more interested in showing how Wells’s early life shaped him to become the great prophet of the modern age. Particularly, she is good at visualizing how frustrated Wells must be as an apprentice draper. A experience that he used to write Kipps in 1905, his novel.
She’s excellent, too, on the rough and tumble of newspaper journalism in the early 1900s.
Plenty of literary superstars make appearances – Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Hardy, Shaw and James were all friends – but Tomalin’s loyalty remains with Herbert George Wells.
As the book’s subtitle suggests, she is most impressed by his determination to improve the world.
The Coppolas: A Movie Dynasty
Ian Nathan Palazzo £20
Rating: 
To some extent,’ Francis Ford Coppola once said, ‘I have become Michael Corleone.’ To pretty much the whole extent, the reader of Ian Nathan’s The Coppolas might conclude.
The book’s subtitle calls the Coppola family a ‘dynasty’, though Nathan seems oblivious to the negative connotations of that word. The producer Robert Evans once called Coppola ‘an evil person… a direct descendant of Machiavelli’s Prince’.
Yet the suspicion that Coppola’s name has opened Tinseltown doors for a whole bunch of his children and grandchildren no better at movie management than The Godfather’s fictional producer, Jack Woltz, never crosses Nathan’s mind in this history of the movie-making family.
It is a relief to see Ian Nathan turn to Sofia Coppola’s movies (above left),
The tin will be considered gold if it has Coppola written on it.
The Godfather, and its sequel, are both masterpieces. Mario Puzo’s novel is a sprawling mess. Coppola who is a writer as well as a director, turned it into an utter nightmare.
Watched back to back, the first two Godfathers take up more than six hours of your time – but they move at a real clip.
The Godfather was, as it should be said, a huge success. Coppola earned $7 million. Wealth and success gave him freedom, but as Orson Welles could have told him, freedom isn’t always a blessing in Hollywood.
‘I thought I couldn’t do anything wrong,’ Coppola said. What he really thought, Nathan makes clear, is that he could do anything wrong – and get away with it.
Still, the first fruits of Coppola’s freedom were tasty enough. The Conversation (1974) stars Gene Hackman as ‘the best bugger on the West Coast’.
Not so much a private eye as a private ear, he’s a sound expert who records the antics of cheating husbands for worried wives. He listens in to the plot of a murder, and then he becomes obsessed with paranoid fantasies.
It’s a great story, even though, as Nathan acknowledges, it owes a lot to Antonioni’s 1960s art-house thriller Blow-Up. This is where the problem lies. Coppola was attracted to ideas and not dramas since he made his first movie about a gangster gangster.
Take 1979’s Apocalypse Now. It’s hard not to be influenced by the Vietnam movie. How loud those choppers sound! They explode! It was the aroma of that napalm, Robert Duvall reminiscing.
But who could deny that after an hour or so, Coppola gets bogged down in his attempt to retell Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness via the poetry of T. S. Eliot?
His entire career has been marred by this pretentiousness. So it’s a relief when Nathan turns to the movies made by Coppola’s daughter, Sofia.
No, Lost In Translation and Marie Antoinette aren’t a patch on her dad’s early work (nor is her remake of Don Siegel’s southern gothic western The Beguiled very beguiling).
But though Sofia’s need to tell tales about young girls and older guys is getting worrying, at least she’s trying to tell those tales. Francis Ford Coppola is alone, much like Michael Corleone near the end of The Godfather.
Christopher Bray