Tono-Bungay
Tono-Bungay (original title: Tono-Bungay) is a utopian novel published in 1909 with a socially critical background by the British writer HG Wells .
action
The narrator's uncle produces a miracle drug called Tono-Bungay in his village pharmacy, which is supposed to help anything and everything, but actually does nothing. Through clever and sensational advertising on a large scale, using the most modern possibilities of the time, the drug becomes a bestseller and makes its inventor George Ponderevo rich. He begins to juggle with his fortune, buys and sells entire company empires and speculates on a large scale. The entire transactions, however, are financed with foreign money, loans , bills of exchange and stock options . When the bubble bursts the world plunges into an economic crisis. Ponderevo flees from the creditors to France in the dirigible balloon invented by his nephew and dies in a village on the Bay of Biscay .
effect
The author sees the rare clarity global economic crisis ahead of the 1929th In the novel, criticism is made of the nobility and clergy, but also of socialist “babblers” whose activities are lost in verbalism. Despite its length, the plot is surprisingly modern, it anticipates the effects of unrestrained capitalism and, in some passages, reminds one of the arguments on the occasion of the locust debate in the German Bundestag. As far as the story of the first-person narrator is concerned, the novel also has autobiographical features: Wells himself was an apprentice pharmacist in a small town, his mother a housekeeper in a manor house.
“Civilization is only possible through trust, as is the fact that we can take our money to the bank and walk the streets unarmed. The bank reserves or a policeman keeping order in a crowd are an outrageous bluff. The expectations attached to it could not be met for a moment if only a quarter of them were demanded. All modern investing is made of the stuff dreams are made of. A lot of people are sweating and struggling, large railroad networks are being built, cities are rising to the sky, mines are being opened, trading houses are busy, ships are cruising at sea, countries are being settled, and wealthy financiers are in control of the busy, troubled world Everything, enjoying everything, trustingly and creating a trust that welds everyone together into a reluctant but subconsciously anchored brotherhood ... The flags are fluttering, the crowd applauds, the legislative bodies meet. Yet I sometimes find that this whole bustling civilization really isn't much different than a swelling, thinning bubble of promise. And I find that their arithmetic is just as unhealthy, their dividend so ill-considered, their ultimate goal just as unclear, that maybe everything is heading toward something terrifyingly similar to his [the narrator's uncle] personal catastrophe. "
literature
HG Wells: Tono-Bungay , Ullstein-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. - Berlin - Vienna 1983, ISBN 3-548-20259-4