William2's Reviews > The Island of Dr Moreau

Margaret Atwood reminds us in her introduction here of just how beloved The Island Of Dr. Moreau was by the inimitable Jorge Luis Borges, who called it an “atrocious miracle.” “Speaking of Wells’s early tales—The Island Of Dr. Moreau among them—he said ‘I think they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.’” Just for the record, the last time I checked there were 370 million native English speakers, and another 1.7 billion who use it as a lingua franca. I’ll say this much for the novella, the onset of suspense is far subtler than Frankenstein, which I recently reread. Frankenstein moves relatively quickly to a kind of full-bore hysteria and remains there for the duration. Here, the building of suspense is more gradual and then it modulates as the danger falls and rises once more. Commendable too is the novella’s compressed action and vivid description. ”Colour vanished from the world, the tree tops rose against the luminous blue sky in inky silhouette.” Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness seems the only peer I might cite. And like both Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein it is a Chinese-box narrative—a story within a story. The novella must be read as a product of its time, like Frankenstein. The reprehensible science here is vivisection between species. It’s a given of the narrative that such exchanges of tissue can occur. So swallow the Kool-Aid, and allow Wells his conceit. Frankenstein was about vivisection, too, and it first appeared in 1818. This novella was published in June 1895, which tells us something about how long these erroneous ideas of monster creation were popular with the general public. (Now we’ve got CRISPR and scads of far, far more horrifying technologies. The Chinese, it’s reported, are creating supermen, and so on.) Dr. Moreau is a part of our SF heritage. The prose is on the whole quite wonderful. The end is heartbreakingly sad and moving, especially if one loves animals and nature.