The Island Of Doctor Moreau

Book 146: S.F. MASTERWORKS

by H.G. Wells

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

Edward Prendick finds himself floating perilously in the ocean after having been shipwrecked. He is picked up and his life saved by the curious Dr Montgomery, a medical man travelling with a cargo of various wild animals. Prendick soon finds himself once again adrift at sea after an argument with a hostile and drunken captain.

For a second time Montgomery appears as his saviour and he is hauled ashore on the Island of Dr Moreau, Montgomery’s mysterious colleague and mentor.

As he encounters some of the deformed and bestial inhabitants on the island, Prendick soon comes to realise that he has heard of this infamous Dr Moreau before. Now begins a nightmarish existence as the full truth of Moreau’s scientific ambitions become horribly apparent.

Head StoriesAudio presents "The Island of Dr Moreau" by H.G. Wells. Narrated by Simon Hester. With original music.

Release date: January 1, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 208

Sample

INTRODUCTION

Names are human. Animals do without them, but we humans like to name ourselves and the world around us; and, moreover, like to string together elaborate webs and skeins of names into – for instance – novels. Wells’ beast-man novel The Island of Doctor Moreau appeared in the middle of an extraordinary burst of creativity that also produced 1895’s The Time Machine (in which humans devolve into bestial forms) and 1898’s War of the Worlds (in which bestial aliens smash civilisation). Something was on his mind: a Darwinian something – Wells had studied under Darwin’s disciple, T. H. Huxley. Something about the proximity of humanity and animality. Before Darwin humans had believed themselves unique, god-formed, fundamentally different to animals. Darwin said: humans are just animals that evolution has mutated.

The Island of Doctor Moreau is the first great novel of that profound revolution in thought: a concise, readable and superbly memorable fable. A well-bred Englishman, Edward Prendick, is marooned upon a Pacific island inhabited only by the vivisectionist Dr Moreau (and his assistant, Montgomery), plus the various half-men Moreau has fashioned by means of surgical and other interventions into animal life. Filmed many times, adapted by other writers, the bad Doctor’s name has become a shorthand for vivisectionist sadism and creative bestiality.

Less than halfway through the narrator suddenly understands. ‘“Moreau!” said I; “I know that name.”’ The critics have made much of the naming in this novel: ‘Moreau’ in French means ‘brown-skinned, like a Moor’; and although the Moreau Wells portrays is exaggeratedly white, with a long white beard (a parody God-the-father) he is also the novel’s locus for its anxieties about race, miscegenation and pollution – very much part of the context of imperial Britain in the 1890s. Other critics have suggested the first syllable of Moreau’s name hints at mors, morte, death; just as the second (‘eau’ means water) points to his islander isolation, or perhaps to the fluidity with which he treats flesh.

But we can go a little further. It has always seemed to me that the name Moreau is an extended or crumbling-at-the-edges version of the name ‘More’, the man who wrote the world’s first Utopia – another fable set upon a distant island where human nature was reworked and refined. Moreau’s land is called ‘Noble’s Island’: a name which gestures, ironically, at nobility whilst also including an echo of More’s original tale in its first syllable (for the name ‘utopia’ is a learned pun that means both good-place and no-place). ‘No-bles’, Wells’ ‘No-’ island, is a place markedly un-blessed. More’s Pacific island is an idealised, happy place; Wells mercilessly twists the venerable paradigm into monstrous, dystopian shapes.

What of Edward Prendick? Personally, I’ve also thought there’s something of the ‘pretender’ compressed into his surname – and though the narrator, Edward, is named for the then Prince of Wales, the volume is actually presented to us by his nephew, named after the Young Pretender, ‘Charles Edward’. To what is Prendick pretending? To his humanity, presumably: what was once taken as ontological bedrock has, since Darwin, been revealed as a thin veneer laid over a fundamentally bestial base.

This is a novel whose symbolic meanings are so richly layered that, as with the naming, here, it’s possible to get carried away. Margaret Atwood, in a celebrated recent introductory essay on the novel, offers ten variant readings, in quick succession – Moreau as evolutionary thought experiment, as 1890s imperial adventure yarn, as scientific romance, as reworking of The Tempest, or the Bible or Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. But, brilliant as all this is, I can’t help wondering whether such prodigality of interpretation rather misses the point of Wells’ novel. Because, actually, The Island of Doctor Moreau is simple. Its brute clarity is the core of its enduring appeal. It is simple because animals are simple, relatively speaking. We keep pets, and some people prefer pets to people, because pets give us crucial things – companionship, loyalty, love, diversion – without all the complications entailed by adult human relationships. The simplicity of animals is not an innocence, of course; it would be naïve to think so. Yet it is a central part of the way the beast signifies to humanity (this last qualification is important: simplicity, or complexity, are human conceptions after all, and mean nothing to animals except in the context of their relationship to humanity).

Wells is superb on the ramifications of this simplicity: not only its potential for violence, its – to use a loaded term – ‘barbarism’, but also its eerie glamour, compounded of charm and strangeness. All genuinely simple things partake of this glamour, I think, because the intrinsic richness and complexity of human existence throws the truly simple into a stark, lovely but inhuman contrast. Hence, for example, the ‘elvish faces’ of the first beast-men Prendick encounters: ‘they wore turbans, too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me, faces with protruding lower jaws and bright eyes.’ Hence too the faerie ‘pointed ears and luminous eyes of Montgomery’s assistant.’

Freud mapped this territory expertly in his Civilisation and Its Discontents; but Wells got there first. The Island of Doctor Moreau understands completely that violence is simple where civilisation (negotiation, compromise, repression) is complicated. Moreau holds his beast men in check with a Law that is a nominalisation of Pain, his medium for creating them: a simple, though precarious, strategy. The trace of the novel is the disintegration, or degeneration, of this imposed structure.

When I first read this novel, the pain Moreau inflicts on his creatures bothered me considerably. I don’t mean in an ethical sense (although of course that), but practically speaking. Why does he not use anaesthetics? The tale is set in 1887. Ether and chloroform had been widely used in surgery since the 1840s. But, no: Moreau refuses to anesthetise his victims. Why? Because pain is as much part of his surgical toolkit as anything else. In his own terrifying words: ‘each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature.’ There’s a name for that too: sadism. One of the things Wells is doing here is dramatising a sort of apotheosis of sadism; pain as a metaphysical horizon of being.

There’s more to this, though, than is covered by the description ‘sadism’. At one point, Prendick asks Moreau why ‘he had taken the human form as his model.’ ‘There seemed to me then,’ he adds, ‘and seems to me now, a strange wickedness in that choice.’ Moreau’s answer (‘he had chosen that form by chance’) is very evidently not the truth of it. Prendick perhaps takes the ‘strange wickedness’ that makes him queasy to be blasphemy. But I think the novel is saying something else, leading us towards a rather different sort of name: love.

The Island of Doctor Moreau is populated with various forms of Moreau’s beast-men, but there is only one female in the novel, painstakingly (literally) created out of an altered puma during the course of the novel. Several critics have noted a sexual subtext here: ‘cat’ was Victorian slang for ‘prostitute’; Wells, a sexually promiscuous man, styled himself ‘Jaguar’ when he was with his lover Rebecca West, just as she was ‘Panther.’ It certainly looks as though Moreau is in the business of making a mate for himself.

But this is also his downfall. Although it is the taste of blood that encourages the beast-men to revolt, it is the escape of the Puma-woman that spells Moreau’s individual doom. We recognise the rightness of this, I think; that this unleashed female potency will destroy the simplicity of Moreau’s garden Eden. Beasts are simple; and pain is simple. But love is not simple, and it collapses Moreau’s brutal idyll. And that’s there in his name, too – as if Wells has excavated Moreau’s name from the Tarot card that could predict his doom, LAMOUREUX, the lovers. The gesture is, as with his treatment of More’s Utopia, ironic: for love is the one thing lacking from this chilling, brilliant little novel.

Adam Roberts

1In the Dinghy of the ‘Lady Vain’

I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vain. As every one knows, she collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao. The long-boat with seven of the crew was picked up eighteen days after by HM gunboat Myrtle, and the story of their privations has become almost as well known as the far more terrible Medusa case. I have now, however, to add to the published story of the Lady Vain another as horrible, and certainly far stranger. It has hitherto been supposed that the four men who were in the dinghy perished, but this is incorrect. I have the best of evidence for this assertion – I am one of the four men.

But, in the first place, I must state that there never were four men in the dinghy; the number was three. Constans, who was ‘seen by the captain to jump into the gig’ (Daily News, March 17, 1887), luckily for us, and unluckily for himself, did not reach us. He came down out of the tangle of ropes under the stays of the smashed bowsprit; some small rope caught his heel as he let go, and he hung for a moment head downward, and then fell and struck a block or spar floating in the water. We pulled towards him, but he never came up.

I say, luckily for us he did not reach us, and I might almost add luckily for himself, for there were only a small breaker of water and some soddened ship’s biscuits with us – so sudden had been the alarm, so unprepared the ship for any disaster. We thought the people on the launch would be better provisioned (though it seems they were not), and we tried to hail them. They could not have heard us, and the next morning when the drizzle cleared – which was not until past mid-day – we could see nothing of them. We could not stand up to look about us because of the pitching of the boat. The sea ran in great rollers, and we had much ado to keep the boat’s head to them. The two other men who had escaped so far with me were a man named Helmar, a passenger like myself, and a seaman whose name I don’t know, a short sturdy man with a stammer.

We drifted famishing, and, after our water had come to an end, tormented by an intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether. After the second day the sea subsided slowly to a glassy calm. It is quite impossible for the ordinary reader to imagine those eight days. He has not – luckily for himself – anything in his memory to imagine with. After the first day we said little to one another, and lay in our places in the boat and stared at the horizon, or watched, with eyes that grew larger and more haggard every day, the misery and weakness gaining upon our companions. The sun became pitiless. The water ended on the fourth day, and we were already thinking strange things and saying them with our eyes; but it was, I think, the sixth before Helmar gave voice to the thing we all had in mind. I remember our voices dry and thin, so that we bent towards one another and spared our words. I stood out against it with all my might, was rather for scuttling the boat and perishing together among the sharks that followed us; but when Helmar said that if his proposal was accepted we should have drink, the sailor came round to him.

I would not draw lots, however, and in the night the sailor whispered to Helmar again and again, and I sat in the bows with my clasp-knife in my hand – though I doubt if I had the stuff in me to fight. And in the morning I agreed to Helmar’s proposal and we handed halfpence to find the odd man.

The lot fell upon the sailor, but he was the strongest of us and would not abide by it, and attacked Helmar with his hands. They grappled together and almost stood up. I crawled along the boat to them, intending to help Helmar by grasping the sailor’s leg, but the sailor stumbled with the swaying of the boat, and the two fell upon the gunwale and rolled overboard together. They sank like stones. I remember laughing at that and wondering why I laughed. The . . .