***Some spoilers***

Just had to read this book. It was a quick read, though the language was a bit hard for me to wade through. But such was the language of the old classics. An interesting concept. The narrator is saved by Montgomery, who is Dr. Moreau's assistant. Through no fault of his own, the narrator is left on the island of Dr. Moreau, Montgomery, and some very odd looking "Human beings." But, they are not human. Dr. Moreau is trying to take animals and turn them into human beings. To walk, talk and think like human beings. That is ultimately his demise, to be killed by his lifes work. His assistant, Montgomery, also an outcast from the world, meets almost the same demise, even though he is closer to the beast creatures. The main character of the book, though, manages to get away. ( )

Tumult count: 12 (7 x "Tumult", 5 x "Tumultuous")

Other than some mildly annoying inconsistencies I found this thoroughly enjoyable. There was, for example, an occasion where one character was sometimes referred to as "the white haired man" and at other points referred to as "the grey haired man", thus leading me to believe there to be two similar characters when there was in fact only one. A rather bafflingly silly blip in the writing there...

Other than that though (and the muther FlIPpInG TUMULTS!), this was great. I enjoyed the first half more than the second half but that was mainly because a lot of the built up mystery is unveiled half way through. The rest of the book then merely serves to milk the concept and conclude the adventure. ( )

Since a book titled The Daughter of Dr. Moreau is nominated for a Hugo this year, I figured I had better take a look at the H. G. Wells original. The plot is rudimentary: Edward Prendick is rescued from a lifeboat in the Pacific only to be dumped on an island run by a mad scientist using vivisection and resection to uplift animals to sapience. The results are, to say the least, equivocal. Vivisection was a hot-button issue in the scientific community at the time, as was a debate between evolutionists and devolutionists. Clearly, Wells is updating the science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the psychology of the Marquis de Sade. The novel’s literary roots also extend back to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Moreau wants to create a race of Houyhnhnms but only manages rule-driven Yahoos. Like Gulliver, Prendick is no longer at ease in England. He retreats into the hard sciences of chemistry and astronomy, avoiding the ethical dilemmas inherent in biology. ( )

3&fract12; stars. Very well done but not my sort of thing. I had to go watch some silly TV for a while after finishing to get the image of the Beast People and Moreau and Montgomery themselves out of my head. ( )

Some short novels are really just extended short stories and could have been wrapped up in half the pages. THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU could easily have been much longer. It is a tight little novel—every moment is devoted to tipping the scales, finding where we are on the line of humanity. At the very start our main character is dehumanized by being lost at sea…long enough to have abandoned reason. When found, he is nursed back to health by someone who is constantly losing his reason to alcohol. Even Dr. Moreau is never as savage as when imparting science to his creations. The narrator Prendick says toward the end of the novel, “An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.” This includes of course lying to oneself—Moreau has made this into an art form. The Man-Beasts that Moreau creates are not static either—there is a constant tug and pull between animal and man. They are created during an act of brutality and it is largely the fear of it’s return that keeps them human. Once that fear is gone, they revert to a form of their animal selves. Not a favorable critique of humanity. There is a point where Prendick (what can that name possibly mean?) drifts into a stasis with the Man-Beasts—for some weeks there is relative peace on the island. But any form of man will eventually fail to keep the peace. Much is written about H G Wells seeing the future—here forecasting genetic engineering. But really he was just a keen observer of his own times—extrapolating off the world around him. He saw the great acceleration of change at the end of the 19th century and realized it would not slow down. In the midst of a world becoming more mechanical, Wells writes here to ponder just what it is to be human. He discovers just how intangible that can be and how quickly it can elude us. ( )