Book Review: The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

Paperback, 186 pages

Published May 2017 by Gollancz (first published 1896)

SF Masterworks edition!

“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”

I know it is amazing that at this point in my life I have never read this Wells classic. While I have read The Time Machine and War of The Worlds multiple times and even Food of the Gods I was nervous the last few decades about reading Doctor Moreau because I feared that it glorified animal experimentation. I know, I could not be more wrong. I don't think ole HG was actually a liberationist but the message in its 1896 way is without a doubt a form of early animal rights.

If is hard to deny passages like...

“Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau —”

Wells often made messages a huge part of his work, it was undeniable that Time Machine commented on the still controversial issue of evolution something he was familiar with having worked as a Lab assistant with one Darwin's associates. The War of The Worlds was clearly a message to the people of his Britain about their ever-expanding colonial empire. Food of the Gods if I remember correctly was about class inequality.

So there are many messages in this novel besides animal rights, also the hubris of science gone mad, and the nature of what makes us human. That to me is the heart of what makes this story so scary, the blurred lines between nature and humanity.

I'll get back to that in a moment but first the plot. I know there have been attempts to make films based on this work but they are mostly terrible. The closest we probably got was when Richard Stanley (Color out of Space) was fired during pre-production in the 90s. Do yourself a favor and listen to the Post-Mortem with Mick Garris interview with Stanley released a few months ago. The story behind the movie is amazing.

TIODM is a short and very Victoria novel, told in the first person that is better executed than Wells earlier novel The Time Machine. I have laughed when I have seen this work called Lovecraftian and have to remind people that this pre-dates ole HP and was likely an influence on him.

While this novel is delightfully creepy and weird, it is told without Lovecraft purple prose and a serious economy of words. Wells doesn't waste time. To me this felt like it could have been Pendrick's journal but you have to believe he was a good writer. Very few first-person narratives work for me in that way because it often feels "written" a good example of natural-sounding first person is Stephen King's Delores Claiborne.

Oh yeah the Story, it is about Pendrick the survivor of a shipwreck who is rescued by Montgomery who is on his way to re-join his master the mad scientist Doctor Moreau. Through a series of excellently laid out beats of suspense, Penrick learns that the disgraced British vivisector Moreau has come to this remote place to conduct his experiments. Those include spliced genes of humans and animals.

This is amazing science fiction considering it was written in the 19th century long before the genre had a name. Indeed Wells called his works Scientific Romances. This book is body horror, that is almost a hundred years before Barker and Cronenberg would make that a thing. The question, however, is what is the more freaky part? The man-beasts or the speeches that Doctor Moreau gives. I think the later...

I know that Wells mostly comes off as stuffy to modern eyes, but I think this novel was a pretty smooth read. To me, it is the most vivid of Wells novels and the most timeless there is very little that draws attention to the fact that the novel is one hundred and twenty four years old. It is more powerful and scary than most of the horror fiction today. That is one reason it should be read. Also, I loved this quote:

“It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.”

What we do to animals has not progressed far enough in the years since this book was written. It is often in the case of animals that humans are afraid to look at the horrors they are personally responsible for. That is often because the suffering directly benefits humans. From flavor to entertainment nothing is off-limits and sadly it is the law. I hope there is a change before this book gets much older but that is up to us all.