249 pages
Published 1896
Read from April 18 to April 19
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
Like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau was another tweenage favorite, read during the years when I lived in a car with my paranoid, abusive father (who seldom let me read anything more recent than the Edwardian era). I’ve been drawn to reread it ever since I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s excellent The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. Lacking access to my home library thanks to the move, and not yet having settled in enough to get a proper library card, I felt this was as good a time as any to give it a go.
Making the comparisons with Daughter is pretty much the only reason to read the original. Right from its conception, Wells’ Island is rancid with Victorian race theory, that bastard progeny of white supremacist theology and an early approximation of natural selection. The proverbial road from “beast” to “man” interested Victorians extremely, not least because the Christian conceit of the Great Chain of Being, dating back to medieval Neoplatonism, could be draped over their tentative glimpses of the evolutionary past, thus creating an ideological Frankenstein, a cobbled-together abomination to uphold their preconceived notions of superiority, with the Englishman just a couple steps below God. Even atheists of the day were enmeshed in this worldview, despite its theological origins. It was the foundation for late Victorian thought.
More succinctly, Island reeks of racism. Just absolutely foul with it. Racist imagery and racist implications cut through every depiction of Moreau’s creations; all the standard Victorian racial descriptors are in play.
Wells’ proto-technothriller style is far from its best here, burdened with clumsy description and awkward action. I will admit to some lingering wry fondness for Wells’ theological satire — God is a white-haired vivisectionist, indifferent to the pain and fear of his subjects — but even that is little more than a baby step toward religious deconstruction. The ending cribs more or less wholesale from Gulliver’s departure from the Houyhnhnms.
The few bits of the story worth salvaging found fresh life in Moreno-Garcia’s reimagining, so really, there just isn’t much point in revisiting Island, unless you plan to reinterpret and recontextualize it your own way.
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