When Stephen said he was going to read this novel for Mount Doom (TBR pile), I jumped at the chance to revisit it. This work of sci-fi horror by HG Wells has haunted me over the years. I can’t remember when I first read it, but the most recent time was in 2018, after I’d read a troubling magazine article that reminded me of the story. (More on that to come.) I had somehow managed to forget the ending, and went into this third reading ready for some good plot twists.
It is odd how a book like this can make you feel…well, cozy. All I can say is that prior reading experience shaped my memories. So it was that I felt a strange sense of nostalgia as I rejoined Edward Prendick on his ill-fated, accidental journey to the Island, and greeted again the monstrous Dr Moreau who lords over it. The creatures of the Island held only a fraction of their old terror for me, but the tragedy of Montgomery, Moreau’s drunken assistant, became much realer as I understood him better.
I won’t recap the story, but in short, this is a tale of a scientist who has taken too much into his own hands and justifies everything in the name of research. The ethics and laws of the world—even the reality of pain itself—do not factor into his scale of justice. In fact, he doesn’t really have one; he is interested only in pursuing his experiments as far as he can take them. As it turns out, ten years on a deserted island can get you pretty far.
Wells seemed to believe that the science in his novel was futuristically possible. Modern readers have reason to doubt this, but the novel is not hard science fiction and should not be read as such. Instead, the novel presents the reader with a simple question: what is the difference between an animal and a human being? This tale of adventure and horror becomes a philosophical exploration, and those of religious belief will be doubly disturbed by what they read.
With a human-monkey embryo and now synthetic embryos in laboratories, and support for humanzees published unabashedly, it’s getting harder and harder to pass Wells’s work off as the Lovecraftian fancies of a quaint old author. The ideas in this 1896 novel are disturbingly evergreen, as we move towards a future where some ghost of Moreau’s dreams could become reality.
On a more immediate note, I was reminded of the current atrocities committed against animals in our medical and food industries. Dr Moreau is not alone in his apathy to his subjects’ misery. Countless animals are being tortured as we speak, for one reason or another; their lives thrown away as soon as their “usefulness” is expended. Is Moreau really so alienated from society itself? Perhaps in the Victorian era, he would have been. These days, I see less of a difference.
Altogether, The Island of Doctor Moreau remains my favorite of Wells’s sci-fi novels and well worth at least one read. There are some very dated racial references that prevent me from rating it higher than a 4 out of 5. Nonetheless, its flaws do not get in the way of its core question, and I think it is a question many still need to answer today.
Classics Considered 
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