All those just mentioned, however, keep within the boundaries set by the possible. The Island of Doctor Moreau is, on the contrary, a work of fantasy, and its more immediate grandparents are to be found elsewhere. The Tempest springs immediately to mind: here is a beautiful island, belonging at first to a witch, then taken over by a magician who lays down the law, particularly to the malignant, animal-like Caliban, who will obey only when pain is inflicted on him. Dr. Moreau could be seen as a sinister version of Prospero, surrounded by a hundred or so Calibans of his own creation.
But Wells himself points us toward another enchanted island. When Prendick mistakenly believes that the beast-men he’s seen were once men, he says, “[Moreau] had merely intended … to fall upon me with a fate more horrible than death, with torture, and after torture the most hideous degradation it was possible to conceive—to send me off, a lost soul, a beast, to the rest of [the] Comus rout.”
Comus, in the masque of that name by Milton, is a powerful sorcerer who rules a labyrinthine forest. He’s the son of the enchantress Circe, who in Greek myth was the daughter of the Sun and lived on the island of Aeaea. Odysseus landed there during his wanderings, and Circe transformed his crew into pigs. She has a whole menagerie of other kinds of animals—wolves, lions—that were also once men. Her island is an island of transformation: man to beast (and then to man again, once Odysseus gets the upper hand).
As for Comus, he leads a band of creatures, once men, who have drunk from his enchanted cup and have turned into hybrid monsters. They retain their human bodies, but their heads are those of beasts of all kinds. Thus changed, they indulge in sensual revels. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, with its animal-form goblins who tempt chastity and use luscious edibles as bait, is surely a late offshoot of Comus.
As befits an enchanted island, Moreau’s island is both semi-alive and female but not in a pleasant way. It’s volcanic, and emits from time to time a sulphurous reek. It comes equipped with flowers, and also with clefts and ravines, fronded on either side. Moreau’s beast-men live in one of these, and since they do not have very good table manners, it has rotting food in it and it smells bad. When the beast-men start to lose their humanity and revert to their beast natures, this locale becomes the site of a moral breakdown that is specifically sexual.
What is it that leads us to believe that Prendick will never have a girlfriend?
6. THE UNHOLY TRINITY
Nor will Dr. Moreau. There is no Mrs. Moreau on the island. There are no female human beings at all.
Similarly, the God of the Old Testament has no wife. Wells called The Island of Doctor Moreau “a youthful piece of blasphemy,” and it’s obvious that he intended Moreau—that strong, solitary gentleman with the white hair and beard—to resemble traditional paintings of God. He surrounds Moreau with semi-biblical language as well: Moreau is the lawgiver of the island; those of his creatures who go against his will are punished and tortured; he is a god of whim and pain. But he isn’t a real God because he cannot really create; he can only imitate, and his imitations are poor.
What drives him on? His sin is the sin of pride, combined with a cold “intellectual passion.” He wants to know everything. He wishes to discover the secrets of life. His ambition is to be as God the Creator. As such, he follows in the wake of several other aspirants, including Dr. Frankenstein and Hawthorne’s various alchemists. Dr. Faustus hovers in the background, but he wanted youth and wealth and sex in return for his soul, and Moreau has no interest in such things; he despises what he calls “materialism,” which includes pleasure and pain. He dabbles in bodies but wishes to detach himself from his own. (He has some literary brothers: Sherlock Holmes would understand his bloodless intellectual passion. So would Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry Wotton, of that earlier fin-de-siècle transformation novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
But in Christianity, God is a trinity, and on Moreau’s island there are three beings whose names begin with M. Moreau as a name combines the syllable “mor”—from mors, mortis, no doubt—with the French for “water,” suitable in one who aims at exploring the limits of plasticity. The whole word means “moor” in French. So the very white Moreau is also the Black Man of witchcraft tales, a sort of anti-God.
Montgomery, his alcoholic assistant, has the face of a sheep. He acts as the intercessor between the beast folk and Moreau, and in this function stands in for Christ the Son. He’s first seen offering Prendick a red drink that tastes like blood, and some boiled mutton. Is there a hint of an ironic Communion service here—blood drink, flesh of the Lamb? The communion Prendick enters into by drinking the red drink and eating the mutton is the communion of carnivores, that human communion forbidden to the beast folk. But it’s a communion he was part of anyway.
The third person of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit, usually portrayed as a dove—God in living but nonhuman form. The third M creature on the island is M’Ling, the beast creature who serves as Montgomery’s attendant. He, too, enters into the communion of blood: he licks his fingers while preparing a rabbit for the human beings to eat. The Holy Spirit as a deformed and idiotic man-animal? As a piece of youthful blasphemy, The Island of Doctor Moreau was even more blasphemous than most commentators have realized.
Just so we don’t miss it, Wells puts a serpent beast into his dubious garden: a creature that was completely evil and very strong, and that bent a gun barrel into the letter S. Can Satan, too, be created by man? If so, blasphemous indeed.
7. THE NEW WOMAN AS CATWOMAN
There are no female human beings on Moreau’s island, but Moreau is busily making one. The experiment on which he’s engaged for most of the book concerns his attempt to turn a female puma into the semblance of a woman.
Wells was more than interested in members of the cat family, as Brian Aldiss has pointed out. During his affair with Rebecca West, she was “Panther,” he was “Jaguar.” But “cat” has another connotation: in slang, it meant “prostitute.” This is Montgomery’s allusion when he says—while the puma is yelling under the knife—“I’m damned … if this place is not as bad as Gower Street—with its cats.” Prendick himself makes the connection explicit on his return to London when he shies away from the “prowling women [who] would mew after me.”
“I have some hope of her head and brain,” says Moreau of the puma. “… I will make a rational creature of my own.” But the puma resists. She’s almost a woman—she weeps like one—but when Moreau begins torturing her again, she utters a “shriek almost like that of an angry virago.” Then she tears her fetter out of the wall and runs away, a great, bleeding, scarred, suffering, female monster. It is she who kills Moreau.
Like many men of his time, Wells was obsessed with the New Woman. On the surface of it he was all in favour of sexual emancipation, including free love, but the freeing of Woman evidently had its frightening aspects. Rider Haggard’s She can be seen as a reaction to the feminist movement of his day—if women are granted power, men are doomed—and so can Wells’s deformed puma. Once the powerful, monstrous sexual cat tears her fetter out of the wall and gets loose, minus the improved brain she ought to have, courtesy of Man the Scientist, look out.
8. THE WHITENESS OF MOREAU,
THE BLACKNESS OF M’LING
Wells was not the only nineteenth-century English writer who used furry creatures to act out English sociodramas. Lewis Carroll had done it in a whimsical way in the Alice books, Kipling in a more militaristic fashion in The Jungle Book.
Kipling made the Law sound kind of noble in The Jungle Book. Not so Wells. The Law mumbled by the animal-men in Moreau is a horrible parody of Christian and Jewish liturgy; it vanishes completely when the language of the beasts dissolves, indicating that it was a product of language, not some eternal, extra-lingual, God-given creed.
Wells was writing at a time when the British Empire still held sway, but the cracks were already beginning to show. Moreau’s island is a little colonial enclave of the most hellish sort. It’s no accident t
hat most (although not all) of the beast folk are black or brown, that they are at first thought by Prendick to be “savages” or “natives,” and that they speak in a kind of mangled English. They are employed as servants and slaves, in a regime that’s kept in place with whip and gun; they secretly hate the real “men” as much as they fear them; and they disobey the Law as much as possible, and kick over the traces as soon as they can. They kill Moreau and they kill Montgomery and they kill M’Ling, and, unless Prendick can get away, they will kill him too, although at first he “goes native” and lives among them, and does things that fill him with disgust and that he would rather not mention.
White Man’s Burden, indeed.
9. THE MODERN ANCIENT MARINER
The way in which Prendick escapes from the island is noteworthy. He sees a small boat with a sail and lights a fire to hail it. It approaches, but strangely: it doesn’t sail with the wind, but yaws and veers. There are two figures in it, one with red hair. As the boat enters the bay, “Suddenly a great white bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor noticed it. It circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its strong wings outspread.” This bird cannot be a gull: it’s too big and solitary. The only white seabird usually described as “great” is the albatross.
The two figures in the boat are dead. But it is this death boat, this life-in-death coffin boat, that proves the salvation of Prendick.
In what other work of English literature do we find a lone man reduced to a pitiable state, a boat that sails without a wind, two death figures, one with unusual hair, and a great white bird? The work is, of course, The Ancient Mariner, which revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature and concludes that this proper relation is one of love. It is when he manages to bless the sea serpents that the Mariner is freed from the curse he has brought upon himself by shooting the albatross.
The Island of Doctor Moreau also revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature, but its conclusions are quite different because Nature itself is seen differently. It is no longer the benevolent, motherly Nature eulogized by Wordsworth, for between Coleridge and Wells came Darwin.
The lesson learned by the albatross-shooting Mariner is summed up by him at the end of the poem:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
In The Ancient Mariner–like pattern at the end of The Island of Doctor Moreau, the “albatross” is still alive. It has suffered no harm at the hands of Prendick. But he lives in the shadow of a curse anyway. His curse is that he can’t love or bless anything living—not bird, not beast, and most certainly not man. He has another curse too: the Ancient Mariner is doomed to tell his tale, and those who are chosen to hear it are convinced by it. But Prendick chooses not to tell because, when he tries, no one will believe him.
10. FEAR AND TREMBLING
What then is the lesson learned by the unfortunate Prendick? It can perhaps best be understood in reference to The Ancient Mariner. The god of Moreau’s island can scarcely be described as a dear God who makes and loves all creatures. If Moreau is seen to stand for a version of God the Creator who “makes” living things, he has done, in Prendick’s final view, a very bad job. Similarly, if God can be considered as a sort of Moreau, and if the equation “Moreau is to his animals as God is to man” may stand, then God himself is accused of cruelty and indifference—making man for fun and to satisfy his own curiosity and pride, laying laws on him he cannot understand or obey, then abandoning him to a life of torment.
Prendick cannot love the distorted and violent furry folk on the island, and it’s just as hard for him to love the human beings he encounters on his return to “civilization.” Like Swift’s Gulliver, he can barely stand the sight of his fellow men. He lives in a state of queasy fear, inspired by his continued experience of dissolving boundaries: as the beasts on the island have at times appeared human, the human beings he encounters in England appear bestial. He displays his modernity by going to a “mental specialist,” but this provides only a partial remedy. He feels himself to be “an animal tormented … sent to wander alone.”
Prendick forsakes his earlier dabblings in biology and turns instead to chemistry and astronomy. He finds “hope”—“a sense of infinite peace and protection”—in “the glittering hosts of heaven.” As if to squash even this faint hope, Wells almost immediately wrote The War of the Worlds, in which not peace and protection, but malice and destruction, come down from the heavens in the form of the monstrous but superior Martians.
The War of the Worlds can be read as a further gloss on Darwin. Is this where evolution will lead—to the abandonment of the body, to giant, sexless, blood-sucking heads with huge brains and tentaclelike fingers? But it can also be read as a thoroughly chilling coda to The Island of Doctor Moreau.
NOTES
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, p. 87.
2. The War of the Worlds, p. 117.
3. Silverberg, Voyagers in Time, p. x.
4. The “brass brassiere” is from an oral history of science fiction prepared by Richard Wolinsky for Berkeley’s KPFA-FM.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go is the sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his chilling rendition of a bootlickingly devoted but morally blank English butler, The Remains of the Day. It’s a thoughtful, crafty, and finally very disquieting look at the effects of dehumanization on any group that’s subject to it. In Ishiguro’s subtle hands, these effects are far from obvious. There’s no Them-Bad, Us-Good preaching; rather there’s the feeling that as the expectations of such a group are diminished, so is its ability to think outside the box it has been shut up in. The reader reaches the end of the book wondering exactly where the walls of his or her own invisible box begin and end.
Ishiguro likes to experiment with literary hybrids, and to hijack popular forms for his own ends, and to set his novels against tenebrous historical backdrops; thus, When We Were Orphans mixes the Boy’s Own Adventure with the 1930s detective story while taking a whole new slice out of the Second World War. An Ishiguro novel is never about what it pretends to pretend to be about, and Never Let Me Go is true to form. You might think of it as the Enid Blyton schoolgirl story crossed with Blade Runner, and perhaps also with John Wyndham’s shunned-children classic, The Chrysalids: the children in Wyndham’s novel, like those in Never Let Me Go, give other people the creeps.
The narrator, Kathy H., is looking back on her school days at a superficially idyllic establishment called Hailsham. (As in “sham”; as in Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, exploiter of uncomprehending children.) At first you think the “H” in “Kathy H.” is the initial of a surname, but none of the students at Hailsham has a real surname. Soon you understand that there’s something very peculiar about this school. Tommy, for instance, who is the best boy at football, is picked on because he’s no good at art: in a conventional school it would be the other way around.
In fact, Hailsham exists to raise cloned children who have been brought into the world for the sole purpose of providing organs to other, “normal” people. They don’t have parents. They can’t have children. Once they graduate, they will go through a period of being “carers” to others of their kind who are already being deprived of their organs; then they will undergo up to four “donations” themselves, until they “complete.” (None of these terms has originated with Ishiguro; he just gives them an extra twist.) The whole enterprise, like most human enterprises of dubious morality, is wrapped in euphemism and shadow: the outer world wants these children to exist because it’s greedy for the benefits they can confer, but it doesn’t wish to look head-on at what is happening. We assume—though it’s never stated—that whatever objections might have been raised to
such a scheme have already been overcome. By now the rules are in place and the situation is taken for granted—as slavery was once—by beneficiaries and victims alike.
All this is background. Ishiguro isn’t much interested in the practicalities of cloning and organ donation. (Which four organs, you may wonder? A liver, two kidneys, then the heart? But wouldn’t you be dead after the second kidney anyway? Or are we throwing in the pancreas?) Nor is this a novel about future horrors: it’s set not in a Britain-yet-to-come but in a Britain-off-to-the-side, in which cloning has been introduced before the 1970s. Kathy H. is thirty-one in the late 1990s, which places her childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and early 1980s—close to those of Ishiguro, who was born in 1955 in Nagasaki and moved to England when he was five. (Surely there’s a connection: as a child, Ishiguro must have seen many young people dying far too soon, through no fault of their own.) And so the observed detail is realistic—the landscapes, the kind of sports pavilion at Hailsham, the assortment of teachers and “guardians,” even the fact that Kathy listens to her music via tape, not CD.
Kathy H. has nothing to say about the unfairness of her fate. Indeed, she considers herself lucky to have grown up in a superior establishment like Hailsham rather than on the standard organ farm. Like most people, she’s interested in personal relationships: in her case, the connection between her “best friend,” the bossy and manipulative Ruth, and the boy she loves—Tommy, the amiable football-playing bad artist. Ishiguro’s tone is perfect: Kathy is intelligent but nothing extraordinary, and she prattles on in the obsessive manner touchy girls have, going back over past conversations and registering every comment and twitch and crush and put-down and cold shoulder and gang-up and spat. It’s all hideously familiar and gruesomely compelling to anyone who’s ever kept a teenaged diary.
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