aPriL does feral sometimes 's Reviews > The Island of Doctor Moreau

‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ by H. G. Wells is a well-known classic of horror, deservedly so. Although it was published in 1896, in my opinion it still belongs at the top of TBR lists if a reader has not yet found the time to read it. This is my second time picking it up. I had forgotten some details since the first time I read the novel was decades ago. I can attest to the book’s reputation of shocking drama, horror and thought-provoking pseudoscience (which due to Crisper and other current DNA test-tube manipulations going on today, is no longer total pseudoscience).

Sensitive animal lovers should avoid the book, though. Doctor Moreau has a great passion for the vivisection of living animals.

I have copied the book blurb below:

”On an uncharted South Pacific island, the mad genius Doctor Moreau has found refuge. It’s here, away from London and the civilized world, that the scientist can conduct his experiments on animals without condemnation. When Edward Prendick, the sole survivor of a shipwreck, washes ashore, he bears witness to Moreau’s cruel research and its bloody, inevitable unraveling.
In exploring the disquieting crossroads of scientific progress and ethical responsibility, Wells’s cautionary account about the perversion of natural order rattles readers’ sensibilities to this day.”

Wells does not indulge in gory graphic scenes, thankfully. But he does describe enough to cause winces and cringing.

I had forgotten that the book is not only about Moreau’s experiments. Edward Prendick has more horrible adventures than I remembered. The terrible one on Moreau’s island was actually the third act, not the first.

Prendick almost dies in a small dinghy after the ship Lady Vain sinks. The Lady Vain collided with a derelict ten days out from Callao, and all aboard her had to leave or drown. Most of the crew went into a longboat, which was picked up 18 days later by a gunboat. There was a lot of deprivations before the men on the longboat were rescued. But the three men aboard the dinghy had no provisions at all. After eight days of being lost at sea, the two other men with Prendick decided to kill one of the three to drink the blood. Prendick refused to participate in the drawing of lots initially. He could not hold out though, and by the next day he was willing. The man who was selected to die decided to fight. Prendick refused to join the fight between the two other men. They fell overboard while struggling against each other and both sank into the ocean. Prendick never saw either of them again. The situation caused Prendick to laugh a lot.

Some time after this horror, Prendick is rescued by another ship, a trader called the Ipecacuanha. Prendick is extremely sick, near-death, but he is cared for by a peculiar alcoholic, a passenger called Montgomery. Montgomery apparently knows something of medical knowledge and he helps Prendick recover. But it isn’t long before Prendick becomes aware he seems to have been pulled out of a frying pan only to be thrown into the fire! The captain of the Ipecacuanha is a drunken brute, and the crew are also not very nice people.

Montgomery hired the ship to transport wild animals - a puma, dogs, rabbits, a llama, and other caged creatures. The captain hates the animals. The captain and the crew also hate and abuse the weird-looking assistant Montgomery has brought with him to help him.

When the ship arrives at the island Montgomery wanted to go to, the captain decides he will never again transport Montgomery and his animals. Montgomery debarks from the ship with his animals, assistant, and supplies on a launch. Prendick desperately argues with Montgomery to be permitted to go on the island with Montgomery aboard the launch, but Montgomery refuses. After moving away from the island, the captain puts Prendick back on the dinghy determined to abandon a man he thinks of as a non-paying passenger. Prendick is once again going to die from lack of food and water.

Of course, when Montgomery sees what the captain has done, he turns the launch around and rescues Prendick.

But was it a rescue? The horrors awaiting Prendick on the island cause Prendick to wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if he had died.

The awful irony behind Moreau’s creating new forms of life (using flesh instead of dirt and ribs, gentle Christian reader) and Montgomery’s teaching the beast men lessons of moral and proper human behaviors is that they wanted to give the animals an existence resembling the one people have, molding their bodies and minds to be human, ‘improving’ them? Really? Really?

‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ becomes an indictment of Humanity in general, actually. It is people who are terrible throughout the book, again and again. The island is a natural Eden which has been befouled by horrors created by a man, who is supposedly a member of God’s greatest creation. Doctor Moreau is a psychopath, in my opinion, but is he the worst character in the novel? Did God create a horror in creating Man? Is Moreau more than a simulacrum of God? Mankind has without question befouled our Eden, the entire Earth. You be the judge, gentle reader….

The poor animals are clearly victims of every human in the novel, true innocents caught up in the nets of various nefarious despoiling gods of Mankind. Prendick is also victimized over and over, psychologically damaged by his experiences, unable to ever fully recover. He clearly is despairingly aware of Man’s fallen nature(s) and his own guilty participation in Evil in order to live. (view spoiler)[In the last chapter, after he returns to…*ahem*… Civilization(?), he is a haunted man, with symptoms of what we now call PTSD. (hide spoiler)].

I highly recommend ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’!

I am including a link to a 1977 movie trailer of a movie made based on ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ on YouTube, one of many movies made :

https://youtu.be/-HqPxxBAUjE

This movie version of the book has a lot of A-list actors of the time, but it is a Samuel Z. Arkoff production. If you are familiar with Arkoff movies, well, nuff said. Probably fun to watch…