Gabrielle's Reviews > The Island of Doctor Moreau

I had read “The Island of Doctor Moreau” years ago, and while I remember the broad strokes of the story, I was fuzzy on the details, as this classic of horror/sci-fi is more of a novella than a novel, I figured it could make a quick book to read during a busy weekend.

A man named Prendick is the sole survivor of a shipwreck, but the boat that rescues him is an odd one: it carries a strange collection of wild animals, in the care of man named Montgomery, who heavily hints at a disgraced past in London. Prendick finds himself stranded with Montgomery and his odd menagerie on a small island, inhabited only by the strange Doctor Moreau, and even stranger creatures that aren’t quite human, but not quite animals either. Prendick soon realizes those creatures are the grotesque results of Moreau’s experiments, and that they struggle not to give in to their most animalistic instincts.

I had completely forgotten how violent and bloody this book is, especially considering it was published in 1896. Anyone who has a hard time reading about violence towards animals should steer clear of this one! While those details made Prendick’s story unpleasant, I found myself frustrated with the book for other reasons.

We never really understand the sinister Doctor’s ultimate goal with his strange vivisection experiments. Is creating those bizarre creatures an end in and of itself, or did he seek to accomplish a bigger end game? We also never really know what the event that caused Montgomery’s downfall actually is, as Victorian quaintness forces Wells to simply hint coyly at events and deed too terrible to speak – yet where is that quaintness when it comes to describing Prendick’s disgust at the sight of the Beast Folk?

I do not plan of doing a deep analysis of the book and the context in which it was written, but it does reek of white colonialist elitism, and of course the violence against animals is atrocious to read. While these elements did not age well, the fundamental idea of the thin line between human and animal remains something we ponder to this day. No to mention the unethical scientific experiments and discovery at the cost of untold suffering… There is a lot to unearth with a book like this one, and in some ways, it is Wells’ nod to “Frankenstein” – as it is a story of scientific curiosity gone terribly wrong.

My biggest issue with this book is actually that it felt rushed: I wanted to know more about Moreau, his past and his terrible work, more about Prendick and the how’s and why’s of him ending up there, more about the Beast Folk and how they came to be organized in that lose social structure they created. An extra hundred pages would have improved this book greatly.

A good, important but gory book.