A review by ed_moore
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

dark mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

“These seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women, men and women forever, perfectly reasonable creatures full of human desires and tender solicitude emancipated from instinct and are slaves of no fantastic law, being altogether distinct from the beast folk. Yet I shrink from them.” 

Once again I wasn’t a huge lover of a book by HG Wells. His writing just doesn’t quite work for me. ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ follows Edward Prendick who is shipwrecked on a remote tropical island used by a Victor Frankenstein-esque doctor who transforms animals into imitations of humans. It was quite similar to Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘The heart of a dog’ in this sense yet Bulgakov did a much better job in exploring this. Wells’ sci-fi has undertones of racism and explicit themes of animal cruelty throughout, which Prendick is somewhat a figure exposing this but also his sympathy is very limited and often leads to violence. There are also traits of Wells’ writing which feature here as I have observed in others of his work, principally the fallback of saying “these creatures were indescribable to my human mind” to paraphrase and then proceeds to not convey to the reader what he is talking about, almost just because its a science fiction Wells uses that as a fallback for lazy writing. I can commend unlike others in this case that the characters were actually named, there were few of them so I had a good understanding of them and development was okay, good for Wells’ standard at least. 

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