The Invisible Man

 

“Alone-- it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.”

I never used to listen to audiobooks, as I found them (at their best) to be cringeworthy, with all the little accents and inflections that the speakers chose to introduce. At their worst, I found them prosaic, stealing away my own creative interpretation of the writing and imposing ideas upon me about the sound and pace of the story. Perhaps, at the root, my distaste for them came from a niggling doubt about the validity of the format. Are audiobooks cheating? My erudite sense of superiority certainly seemed to think so...

In the last few years, my opinions on this subject have softened. For one, every child's first introduction to reading is listening to books being read aloud. Sometimes, when we read, our eyes skip over certain parts of the prose, and we miss elements of the speech patterns and nuances in the dialogue. An added bonus to listening to a book is an assurance that you know how to pronounce words, rather than just use them correctly in a sentence: a challenge that every avid reader can appreciate.

I've found quite a few audiobooks that have changed my overall thoughts about them, and The Invisible Man is one of them. The dramatic reading of a thriller, especially one filled with uniquely specific British accents, can really elevate one's experience with the text. The Invisible Man is such an outlandish story with an entirely unforgettable cast of characters. The people that populate the story are somewhat hapless, blown about by the effects of the protagonist's unpredictable and sometimes violent behavior. This mode of storytelling invites a certain amount of inevitable chaos that is one of the novel's strong points. A thriller is inherently lacking in perfectly reasonable motivations, and thus the reader is not always certain about what lies around each corner, even while knowing that it cannot be good.

The novel is quite short, which I think aids in the immediateness of its plot. We are in the streets, seeing the people of the town dissolve into anarchy as they attempt to locate and escape the wrath of an unseen threat. There is both humor and horror in this scenario. The doors and windows are locked, but is the unperceivable villain hiding in the darkness, waiting to pounce?

The character of the invisible man, both the protagonist and the antagonist, is like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein--blinded by ambition, arrogantly convinced of the importance of his own scientific contributions, and ultimately meeting his demise through these devices. There is a cautionary tale within the book's pages, a sense of reluctant sympathy for the man despite the responsibility he bears for every consequence. He describes the fear, exhaustion, and exposure to the elements that his invisibility has caused him, but yet, he never truly repents of the pride that led him down such a path.

If you are looking for a quick, extremely British, and lightly chaotic thriller, this book will certainly suffice. It is not my favorite, as the character development of nearly every person other than the invisible man is essentially nonexistent. The book holds its readers at arm's length by presenting the story as a deliverance of evidence or report on the events. This technique is enjoyable and uncommon, but is also not my preference in storytelling methods, as the end result is a cold and distant narrator without much emotional depth.