The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells. Easton Press, 2006. 188 pages. In all honesty—like with The Phantom of the Opera—I never intended on reading this book. Why? I have no idea. But because it was in the Easton Press horror series I forced myself to it. What a pleasure. Far from the burden I feared, this short novel surprised me. One might easily compare it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and then layer that with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for it deals with both the ethics of science and the depths of human depravity. What is natural and what is corrupt? Are these subjective or is there a line to be drawn? Dr. Moreau states: "So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick, so long as your own pains drive you, so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin, so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels." (p.105) And the doctor drives his point home literally by stabbing his thigh, unflinchingly, with a scalpel, demonstrating that he has risen above the animal nature in man. "To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature." (p.106) Brilliant! With this argument he nearly converts our poor narrator, Prendick, into a believer; hell, he nearly had me. "You've made a beast of yourself,” says Prendick much later to Montgomery; “To the beasts you may go." (p.155) He continually strives to differentiate between man and beast: “An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.” (p. 173) Our narrator is self-righteous, himself, indignant, but a short while later Prendick must use Moreau’s godlike cruelty in order to survive amongst the beasts. “‘The House of Pain is gone,’ said I, in a loud voice. ‘It will come again. The Master you cannot see. Yet even now he listens above you.’” (p.173) Excellent stuff. Indeed, not only is it thought provoking, this book tells a great story; there are two scenes more horrific in this one novel than I’ve read in twenty so-called horror novels written in the last decade, and Wells’ novel was published in 1898. Of course, I must make one comment and one complaint. The science involved is shotty. Vivisection—though a very cool word—would never render an animal into a man (but it works here because it allows us to explore the allegory, despite Wells’ denial of any allegorical intentions). As to my gripe, before the narrator returns to civilization to ponder the animal inherent in man, there is a chapter in which the pace is inconsistent compared to the rest of the story. What could be an intense cat-n-mouse face-off is told casually and without climax; I only wish Wells would have capitalized on the tension he’d wrought between Prendick and the Swine-man. Aside from that, I loved this book.