The Island of Doctor Moreau (H.G. Wells)

27 Aug, 2024

This post is part of Commonplace Classics, wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love.

I've got the brains
You've got the limbs
Let's make some weird monkeys

- Pet Shop Boys

H.G. Wells was many things: biologist, socialist, novelist, political thinker and activist, eugenicist, futurist, the list goes on. His true calling, though, was to screw as many women as would have him, which apparently was nearly all of them. With his on-trend moustache and ferocious work ethic, Herbert George sent the ladies gaga; even forbidding figures like Rebecca West and Margaret Sanger came under his spell, as it were. It seems like it was all consensual, nothing too creepy, but you wouldn't want him popping in for tea if there were any women lying around unattended: while staying with Maxim Gorky, Wells hooked up with the Russian's mistress, some 27 years his junior. Don Juan's got nothing on this nerd! Little wonder there are few full-length photographs of Wells - he was never inside his own pants for longer than five minutes at a time.

None of this has anything to do with The Island of Doctor Moreau, but I thought it worth mentioning, given the novel's subject matter, that we're dealing with a writer who was both rigorously intellectual and deeply in touch with his animal instincts. "I have done what I pleased, so that every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself," Wells reflected towards the end of his life. "If I have one regret in the amorous realm, it's that I never made it with a dog-man."¹

If you, like Wells, have a thing for dog-men and other grotesque chimeras - and rest assured there's no judgment here, only juvenile snickering - Doc Moreau's secluded island could be just the spot for some R&R. On the other hand, the island is an isolated tropical hell, populated by the aforementioned grotesque chimeras, and ruled over by a scalpel-wielding freak who tortures animals in the pursuit of his dubious science. All in all, you're probably better off going to Ko Samui.

The Island of Doctor Moreau takes the form of a castaway narrative by one Edward Prendick, an Englishman who survives a shipwreck only to end up on the the eponymous island. It doesn't take Prendick long to work out that Moreau is up to no good, what with all the odd-looking people running around with pointy ears and fur, and the incessant, anguished cries of the animals Moreau is busy vivisecting without anaesthesia. Fearing for his life, Prendick legs it into the jungle and meets a group of beast-men who have formed a rudimentary society. Eventually Moreau convinces Pendrick that he's in no danger by explaining that he has no need of human subjects because he's hard at work making his own: “These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes.”

To the extent that Prendick has a personality, he's a strait-laced, commonsensical chap. By contrast, Moreau is a man of satanic ambition, nominally a scientist but in fact a late-Victorian Frankenstein obsessed with his own Promethean fantasies. He's crazy in the coconut, and life on the island teeters on the brink of anarchy. Moreau's chimeras quickly revert to their animal natures; only some pretty half-arsed conditioning via hypnosis prevents them from going full beast-mode. You can take the man out of the hyena, but you can't take the hyena out of the hyena-man, and of course the whole project ends in hubristic catastrophe.

I first read this book as a teen, and I remember well the horror I felt at Moreau's experiments. The specifics are left to the imagination, but evidently Moreau uses a combination of brute force and precision tinkering to achieve his anthropomorphous productions, inflicting weeks and months of torture on the unlucky animals that cross his path. ("I wanted... to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.") In that sense, The Island of Doctor Moreau remains one of the most horrific of classic horror novels. Moreau's lack of "any intelligible object", his "mad, aimless" monomania, adds an extra layer of repulsion. He simply wishes, like an insane god, to create: "Every 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 of my own.'"

There's a lot going on in The Island of Doctor Moreau, with Wells prodding at the pretensions of science and religion both². It's certainly more interesting to think about than it is to read. Prendick is a dry stick, Moreau and Montgomery are one-note characters, and it's difficult to maintain interest in any of them. The beasts are more interesting, and have dramatic potential, but we spend little time with them; indeed Prendick rather haughtily disdains to tell us much about the time he spent as "a man alone" among the hybrids, after Moreau and Montgomery's deaths. I mean - and I'm sorry about this, but this is after all a blog dedicated to fearless inquiry - did he sleep with any of them? You can't tell me the thought never crossed Wells's filthy mind, but then it's difficult to imagine the bloodless Prendick hopping into bed with anything, let alone a sleek and muscular leopard-lady, skilled in the arts of bestial love.

Ultimately, The Island of Doctor Moreau is a middling adventure novel that happens to centre on a concept that retains its power to unsettle. Moreau's error - well, one of them - is to assume that he is improving the animals by converting them into humans, when in fact we are just the worst. Man's inhumanity to man - and beast, and beast-man - knows no bounds. I only wish this bleak vision of infinite depravity in a godless world had been more fun to read.

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The next Commonplace Classic is Willa Cather's 1918 novel My Ántonia.

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