A Dialogue on Moreau

Peter Straub: What sort of book is it, this Island of Dr. Moreau? As one races pell-mell through the narrative, moving smartly from one nasty shock to another on the way toward revelation and resolution, it seems like nothing so much as a boy's adventure novel adapted to the field of science fiction. [ix]

Margaret Atwood: 'Science fiction' as a term was unknown to Wells. [...] Wells himself referred to his science-oriented fictions as 'scientific romances' [...] There are several interpretations of the term 'science'. If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells's scientific romances are by no means scientific: he paid little attention to such boundaries. In both 'scientific romance', and 'science fiction', the scientific element is merely an adjective; the nouns are 'romance' and 'fiction'. [xvii-xviii]

Straub: For the most part, the tone of the narrative is that of reliability and assurance, blandly professional in its assumptions about the contract between reader and writer. Dear reader, this tone seems to say, come along with me, for I guarantee an entertaining journey and a safe return to shore. [...] To Wells' enormous credit, [the first readers] did not find anything so reassuring. [R]eviewers recoiled from the book as if it carried a contagious disease, excoriating Wells for the horrors to which he had exposed the tender reader, the chief among them being blasphemy. [x]

Atwood: [I]n Christianity, God is a Trinity, and on Moreau's island, there are three beings whose names begin with M. [...] [Moreau] means 'Moor' in French. So the very white Moreau is also the Black Man of witchcraft tales, a sort of anti-God. [xxii] But he isn't a real God, because he cannot create; he can only imitate, and his imitations are poor. [xxi] [Montgomery] acts as the intercessor between the Beast Folk and Moreau, and in this function stands in for Christ the Son. [...] Is there a hint of the communion service here - blood drink, flesh of the Lamb? [...] [M'Ling] too enters into the communion of blood.... The Holy Spirit as a deformed and idiotic man-animal? As a piece of youthful blasphemy, The Island of Dr. Moreau was even more blasphemous than most commentators have realized. [xxii]

Straub: Since vivisection...was a controversial method of research, a novel with an anti-vivisection bias should have had no problem with general acceptance; but a fable in which religion appears to be a manipulative sham, science a poisonous threat, and mankind in general so thoroughly implicated in a Mad Vivisectionist's savagery that man himself is a ravening beast was another matter. [xii]

Atwood: Borges' use of the word 'fable' is suggestive, for [...] '[f]able' points to a certain fokloric quality that lurks in the pattern of this curious work.... [xiii] The Island of Dr. Moreau is...a work of fantasy, and its' more immediate grandparents are to be found elsewhere. The Tempest springs immediately to mind.... [xx]

Straub: [Prendick] cannot escape the perception that civilization is but a larger version of the island. Wells has so liberated himself from the conventions and underlying consolations of the adventure tale that his subtext floods up onto the page. The optimistic Edwardian world softens and gutters into fresh horrors, gibberish, and intimations of death. Author and narrator have come to the heart of darkness, and it is...London. [xxvi-xxvii]

Atwood: There are no female human being on Moreau's island, but Moreau is busy making one. [...] Like many men of his time, Wells was obsessed with the New Woman. On the surface of it he was all in favor of sexual emancipation...but the freeing of Woman apparently had its frightening aspects. [I]f women are granted power, men are doomed.... 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. [xxiii]

Straub: In various ways, [Wells' late-life pessimism] inhabits Dr. Moreau, and one reason the book continues to be vital is that Wells can be seen throughout to resist and deny the implications suggested by his own imaginiation. [xiii]
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Margaret Atwood, Foreword to The Island of Dr. Moreau, Penguin Classics edition, 2005. ISBN: 014144102X.

Peter Straub, Foreword to The Island of Dr. Moreau, Modern Library edition, 1996. ISBN: 0679602305.

for the August Slaves of Golconda reading group, selected by Stefanie