In Other Worlds Part 5

I could see, too, how easily those who have toppled an oppressive power take on its trappings and habits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right to warn us that democracy is the hardest form of government to maintain; Orwell knew that in the marrow of his bones because he'd seen it in action. How quickly the precept "All Animals Are Equal" is changed into "All Animals Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others." What oily concern the pigs show for the welfare of the other animals, a concern that disguises their contempt for those they are manipulating. With what alacrity do they put on the once-despised uniforms of the tyrannous humans they have overthrown, and learn to use their whips. How self-righteously they justify their actions, helped by the verbal web-spinning of Squealer, their nimble-tongued press agent, until all power is in their trotters, and pretence is no longer necessary, and they rule by naked force. A revolution often means only that: a revolving, a turn of the wheel of fortune, by which those who were at the bottom mount to the top and a.s.sume the choice positions, crus.h.i.+ng the former power-holders beneath them. We should beware of all those who plaster the landscape with large portraits of themselves, like the evil pig Napoleon.

Animal Farm is one of the most spectacular Emperor-Has-No-Clothes books of the twentieth century, and it got George Orwell into trouble accordingly. People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep. I didn't have all that figured out at the age of nine, of course-not in any conscious way. But we learn the patterns of stories before we learn their meanings, and Animal Farm has a very clear pattern.

Then along came Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Thus I read it in paperback a couple of years later, when I was in high school. Then I read it again, and again: it was right up there among my favourite books, along with Wuthering Heights. At the same time, I absorbed its two companions, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I was keen on all three of them, but I understood Darkness at Noon to be a tragedy about events that had already happened, and Brave New World to be a satirical comedy, with events that were unlikely to unfold in exactly that way. ("Orgy-Porgy," indeed.) But Nineteen Eighty-Four struck me as more realistic, probably because Winston Smith was more like me, a skinny person who got tired a lot and was subjected to physical education under chilly conditions-this was a feature of my school-and who was silently at odds with the ideas and the manner of life proposed for him. (This may be one of the reasons Nineteen Eighty-Four is best read when you are an adolescent; most adolescents feel like that.) I sympathized particularly with Winston Smith's desire to write his forbidden thoughts down in a deliciously tempting secret blank book: I myself had not yet started to write, but I could see the attractions of it. I could also see the dangers because it's this scribbling of his-along with illicit s.e.x, another item with considerable allure for a teenager of the 1950s-that gets Winston into such a mess.

Animal Farm charts the progress of an idealistic movement of liberation toward a totalitarian dictators.h.i.+p headed by a despotic tyrant; Nineteen Eighty-Four describes what it's like to live entirely within such a system. Its hero, Winston Smith, has only fragmentary memories of what life was like before the present dreadful regime set in: he's an orphan, a child of the collectivity. His father died in the war that has ushered in the repression, and his mother has disappeared, leaving him with only the reproachful glance she gave him as he betrayed her over a chocolate bar-a small betrayal that acts both as the key to Winston's character and as a precursor to the many other betrayals in the book.

The government of Airstrip One, Winston's "country," is brutal. The constant surveillance, the impossibility of speaking frankly to anyone, the looming, ominous figure of Big Brother, the regime's need for enemies and wars-fict.i.tious though both may be-which are used to terrify the people and unite them in hatred, the mind-numbing slogans, the distortions of language, the destruction of what has really happened by stuffing any record of it down the Memory Hole-these made a deep impression on me. Let me restate that: they frightened the stuffing out of me. Orwell was writing a satire about Stalin's Soviet Union, a place about which I knew very little at the age of fourteen, but he did it so well that I could imagine such things happening anywhere.

There is no love interest in Animal Farm, but there is one in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston finds a soulmate in Julia, outwardly a devoted Party fanatic, secretly a girl who enjoys s.e.x and makeup and other spots of decadence. But the two lovers are discovered, and Winston is tortured for thoughtcrime: inner disloyalty to the regime. He feels that if he can only remain faithful in his heart to Julia, his soul will be saved-a romantic concept, though one we are likely to endorse. But like all absolutist governments and religions, the Party demands that every personal loyalty be sacrificed to it and replaced with an absolute loyalty to Big Brother. Confronted with his worst fear in the dreaded Room 101, where there's a nasty device involving a cage full of starving rats that can be fitted to the eyes, Winston breaks-"Don't do it to me," he pleads, "do it to Julia." (This sentence has become shorthand in our household for the avoidance of onerous duties. Poor Julia-how hard we would make her life if she actually existed. She'd have to be on a lot of panel discussions, for instance.) After his betrayal of Julia, Winston Smith becomes a handful of malleable goo. He truly believes that two and two make five and that he loves Big Brother. Our last glimpse of him shows him sitting drink-sodden at an outdoor cafe, knowing he's a dead man walking and having learned that Julia has betrayed him too, while he listens to a popular refrain: "Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me."

Orwell has been accused of bitterness and pessimism-of leaving us with a vision of the future in which the individual has no chance, and the brutal, totalitarian boot of the all-controlling Party will grind into the human face forever. But this view of Orwell is contradicted by the last chapter in the book, an essay on Newspeak-the doublethink language concocted by the regime. By expurgating all words that might be troublesome-"bad" is no longer permitted but becomes "double-plus-ungood"-and by making other words mean the opposite of what they used to mean-the place where people get tortured is the Ministry of Love, the building where the past is destroyed is the Ministry of Information-the rulers of Airstrip One wish to make it literally impossible for people to think straight. However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus it's my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he's usually been given credit for.

Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life-in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid's Tale. By that time I was forty-four, and I'd learned enough about real despotisms-through the reading of history, through travel, and through my members.h.i.+p in Amnesty International-that I didn't need to rely on Orwell alone.

The majority of dystopias-Orwell's included-have been written by men, and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in them, they have been either s.e.xless automatons or rebels who've defied the s.e.x rules of the regime. They've acted as the temptresses of the male protagonists, however welcome this temptation may be to the men themselves. Thus Julia, thus the cami-knicker-wearing, orgy-porgy seducer of the Savage in Brave New World, thus the subversive femme fatale of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 seminal cla.s.sic, We. I wanted to try a dystopia from the female point of view-the world according to Julia, as it were. However, this does not make The Handmaid's Tale a "feminist dystopia," except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered "feminist" by those who think women ought not to have these things.

In other respects, the despotism I describe is the same as all real ones and most imagined ones. It has a small, powerful group at the top that controls-or tries to control-everyone else, and it gets the lion's share of available goodies. The pigs in Animal Farm get the milk and the apples, the elite of The Handmaid's Tale get the fertile women. The force that opposes the tyranny in my book is one in which Orwell himself-despite his belief in the need for political organization to combat oppression-always put great store: ordinary human decency, of the kind he praised in his essay on Charles d.i.c.kens. The biblical expression of this quality is probably in the verse "Insofar as you do it unto the least of these, you do it unto me." Tyrants and the powerful believe, with Lenin, that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs and that the end justifies the means. Orwell, when push came to shove, would have believed-on the contrary-that the means define the end. He wrote as if he sided with John Donne, who said, "Every man's death diminishes me." And so say-I would hope-all of us.

At the end of The Handmaid's Tale, there's a section that owes much to Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's the account of a symposium held several hundred years in the future, in which the repressive government described in the novel is now merely a subject for academic a.n.a.lysis. The parallels with Orwell's essay on Newspeak should be evident.

Orwell has been an inspiration to generations of writers in another important respect-his insistence on the clear and exact use of language. "Prose like a windowpane," he said, opting for plainsong rather than ornament. Euphemisms and skewed terminology should not obscure the truth. "Acceptable mega-deaths" rather than "millions of rotting corpses," but hey, it's not us who're dead; "untidiness" instead of "ma.s.sive destruction"-this is the beginning of Newspeak. Fancy verbiage is what confuses Boxer the horse and underpins the chantings of the sheep. To insist on what is, in the face of ideological spin, popular consensus, and official denial: Orwell knew this takes honesty, and a lot of guts. The position of odd man out is always an uneasy one, but the moment we look around and find that there are no longer any odd men among our public voices is the moment of most danger-because that's when we'll be in lockstep, ready for the Three Minutes' Hate.

The twentieth century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made h.e.l.l-the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won-from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we'd have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in.

But with the notorious 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once-open markets, closed minds-because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturer's dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina-all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it-their ways of silencing troublesome dissent. Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things, openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the West are tacitly legitimizing the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us toward the improved world-the utopia we're promised-dystopia must first hold sway. It's a concept worthy of doublethink. It's also, in its ordering of events, strangely Marxist. First the dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat, in which lots of heads must roll; then the pie-in-the-sky cla.s.sless society, which oddly enough never materializes. Instead we just get pigs with whips.

What would George Orwell have to say about it? I often ask myself.

Quite a lot.

Ten Ways of Looking at.

The Island of Doctor Moreau.

by H. G. Wells.

H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau is one of those books that, once read, is rarely forgotten. Jorge Luis Borges called it an "atrocious miracle" and made large claims for it. Speaking of Wells's early tales-The Island of Doctor Moreau among them-he said, "I think they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written."

This has proved true, if film may be considered a language unto itself. The Island of Doctor Moreau has inspired three films-two of them quite bad-and doubtless few who saw them remembered that it was Wells who auth.o.r.ed the book. The story has taken on a life of its own, and, like the offspring of Mary Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein, has acquired attributes and meanings not present in the original. Moreau himself, in his filmic incarnations, has drifted toward the type of the Mad Scientist, or the Peculiar Genetic Engineer, or the Tyrant-in-Training, bent on taking over the world; whereas Wells's Moreau is certainly not mad, is a mere vivisectionist, and has no ambitions to take over anything whatsoever.

Borges's use of the word fable is suggestive, for-despite the realistically rendered details of its surface-the book is certainly not a novel, if by that we mean a prose narrative dealing with observable social life. "Fable" points to a certain folkloric quality that lurks in the pattern of this curious work, as animal faces may lurk in the fronds and flowers of an Aubrey Beardsley design. The term may also indicate a lie-something fabulous or invented, as opposed to that which demonstrably exists-and employed this way it is quite apt, as no man ever did or ever will turn animals into human beings by cutting them up and sewing them together again. In its commonest sense, a fable is a tale-like those of Aesop-meant to convey some useful lesson. But what is that useful lesson? It is certainly not spelled out by Wells.

"Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things for all men," says Borges, "... and it must be ambiguous in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author; he must appear to be ignorant of all symbolism. Wells displayed that lucid innocence in his first fantastic exercises, which are to me the most admirable part of his admirable work." Borges carefully did not say that Wells employed no symbolism: only that he appeared to be ignorant of doing so.

Here follows what I hope will be an equally modest attempt to probe beneath the appearance, to examine the infinite and plastic ambiguity, to touch on the symbolism that Wells may or may not have employed deliberately, and to try to discover what the useful lesson-if there is one-might be.

TEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT.

THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU.

1. ELOIS AND MORLOCKS.

The Island of Doctor Moreau was published in 1896, when H. G. Wells was only thirty years old. It followed The Time Machine, which had appeared the year before, and was to be followed two years later by The War of the Worlds, this being the book that established Wells as a force to be reckoned with at a mere thirty-two years of age.

To some of literature's more gentlemanly pract.i.tioners-those, for instance, who had inherited money and didn't have to make it by scribbling-Wells must have seemed like a puffed-up little counter-jumper, and a challenging one at that, because he was bright. He'd come up the hard way. In the stratified English social world of the time, he was neither working cla.s.s nor top crust. His father was an unsuccessful tradesman; he himself apprenticed with a draper for two years before wending his way, via school-teaching and a scholars.h.i.+p, to the Normal School of Science. Here he studied under Darwin's famous apologist, Thomas Henry Huxley. He graduated with a first-cla.s.s degree, but he'd been seriously injured by one of the students while teaching, an event that put him off schoolmastering. It was after this that he turned to writing.

The Time Traveller in The Time Machine-written just before The Island of Doctor Moreau-finds that human beings in the future have split into two distinct races. The Eloi are as pretty as b.u.t.terflies but useless; the grim and ugly Morlocks live underground, make everything, and come out at night to devour the Eloi, whose needs they also supply. The upper cla.s.ses, in other words, have become a bevy of upper-cla.s.s twitterers and have lost the ability to fend for themselves, and the working cla.s.ses have become vicious and cannibalistic.

Wells was neither an Eloi nor a Morlock. He must have felt he represented a third way, a rational being who had climbed up the ladder through ability alone, without partaking of the foolishness and impracticality of the social strata above his nor of the brutish crudeness of those below.

But what about Prend.i.c.k, the narrator of The Island of Doctor Moreau? He's been pootling idly about the world, for his own diversion we a.s.sume, when he's s.h.i.+pwrecked. The s.h.i.+p is called the Lady Vain, surely a comment on the snooty aristocracy. Prend.i.c.k himself is a "private gentleman" who doesn't have to work for a living, and though he-like Wells-has studied with Huxley, he has done so not out of necessity but out of dilettantish boredom-"as a relief from the dullness of [his] comfortable independence." Prend.i.c.k, though not quite as helpless as a full-fledged Eloi, is well on the path to becoming one. Thus his hysteria, his la.s.situde, his moping, his ineffectual attempts at fair play, and his lack of common sense-he can't figure out how to make a raft because he's never done "any carpentry or suchlike work" in his life, and when he does manage to patch something together, he's situated it too far from the sea and it falls apart when he's dragging it. Although Prend.i.c.k is not a complete waste of time-if he were, he wouldn't be able to hold our attention while he tells his story-he's nonetheless in the same general league as the weak-chinned curate in the later The War of the Worlds, that helpless and drivelling "spoiled child of life."

His name-Prend.i.c.k-is suggestive of "thick" coupled with "prig," this last a thing he is explicitly called. To those versed in legal lore, it could suggest prender, a term for something you are empowered to take without it having been offered. But it more nearly suggests prentice, a word that would have been floating close to the top of Wells's semiconsciousness, due to his own stint as an apprentice. Now it's the upper cla.s.s's turn at apprentices.h.i.+p! Time for one of them to undergo a little degradation and learn a thing or two. But what?

2. SIGNS OF THE TIMES.

The Island of Doctor Moreau not only comes midway in Wells's most fertile period of fantastic inventiveness, it also comes during such a period in English literary history. Adventure romance had taken off with Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island in 1882, and H. Rider Haggard had done him one better with She in 1887. This latter coupled straight adventure-s.h.i.+pwreck, tramps through dangerous swamps and nasty shrubbery, encounters with b.l.o.o.d.y-minded savages, fun in steep ravines and dim grottos-with a big dollop of weirdness carried over from earlier Gothic traditions, done up this time in a package labelled "Not Supernatural." The excessive powers of She are ascribed not to a close encounter with a vampire or G.o.d but to a dip in a revolving pillar of fire, no more supernatural than lightning. She gets her powers from Nature.

It's from this blend-the grotesque and the "natural"-that Wells took his cue. An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters-dragons, gorgons, hydras-keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, s.h.i.+ny salvation of humankind: science.

The other blend that proved so irresistible to readers was one that was developed much earlier, and to singular advantage, by Jonathan Swift: a plain, forthright style in the service of incredible events. Poe, that master of the uncanny, piles on the adjectives to create "atmosphere"; Wells, on the other hand, follows R. L. Stevenson and antic.i.p.ates Hemingway in his terse, almost journalistic approach, usually the hallmark of the ultra-realists. The War of the Worlds shows Wells employing this combination to best effect-we think we're reading a series of news reports and eyewitness accounts-but he's already honing it in The Island of Doctor Moreau. A tale told so matter-of-factly and with such an eye to solid detail surely cannot be-we feel-either an invention or a hallucination.

3. SCIENTIFIC.

Wells is acknowledged to be one of the foremost inventors in the genre we now know as "science fiction." As Robert Silverberg has said, "Every time-travel tale written since The Time Machine is fundamentally indebted to Wells.... In this theme, as in most of science fiction's great themes, Wells was there first."

Science fiction as a term was unknown to Wells; it did not make its appearance until the 1930s, in America, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in bra.s.s bra.s.sieres. Wells himself referred to his science-oriented fictions as "scientific romances"-a term that did not originate with him but with a lesser-known writer called Charles Howard Hinton.

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 those boundaries. The "science" part of these tales is embedded instead in a worldview that derived from Wells's study of Darwinian principles under Huxley and has to do with the grand study that engrossed him throughout his career: the nature of man. This, too, may account for his veering between extreme utopianism (if man is the result of evolution, not of Divine creation, surely he can evolve yet further?) and the deepest pessimism (if man came from the animals and is akin to them, rather than to the angels, surely he might slide back the way he came?). The Island of Doctor Moreau belongs to the debit side of the Wellsian account book.

Darwin's On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man were a profound shock to the Victorian system. Gone was the G.o.d who spoke the world into being in seven days and made man out of clay; in his place stood millions of years of evolutionary change and a family tree that included primates. Gone, too, was the kindly Wordsworthian version of Mother Nature that had presided over the first years of the century; in her place was Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw/ With ravine." The devouring femme fatale that became so iconic in the 1880s and 1890s owes a lot to Darwin. So does the imagery and cosmogony of The Island of Doctor Moreau.

4. ROMANCE.

So much for the "scientific" in "scientific romance." What about the "romance"?

In both "scientific romance" and "science fiction," the scientific element is merely an adjective; the nouns are "romance" and "fiction." In respect to Wells, "romance" is more helpful than "fiction."

"Romance," in today's general usage, is what happens on Valentine's Day. As a literary term it has slipped in rank somewhat-being now applied to such things as Harlequin Romances-but it was otherwise understood in the nineteenth century when it was used in opposition to the term novel. The novel dealt with known social life, but a romance could deal with the long ago and the far away. It also allowed much more lat.i.tude in terms of plot. In a romance, event follows exciting event at breakneck pace. As a rule, this has caused the romance to be viewed by the high literati-those bent more on instruction than on delight-as escapist and vulgar, a judgment that goes back at least two thousand years.

In The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye provides an exhaustive a.n.a.lysis of the structure and elements of the romance as a form. Typically a romance begins with a break in ordinary consciousness, often-traditionally-signalled by a s.h.i.+pwreck, frequently linked with a kidnapping by pirates. Exotic climes are a feature, especially exotic desert islands; so are strange creatures.

In the sinister portions of a romance, the protagonist is often imprisoned or trapped, or lost in a labyrinth or maze, or in a forest that serves the same purpose. Boundaries between the normal levels of life dissolve: vegetable becomes animal, animal becomes quasi-human, human descends to animal. If the lead character is female, an attempt will be made on her virtue, which she manages miraculously to preserve. A rescue, however improbable, restores the protagonist to his or her previous life and reunites him or her with loved ones. Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a romance. It's got everything but talking dogs.

The Island of Doctor Moreau is also a romance, though a dark one. Consider the s.h.i.+pwreck. Consider the break in the protagonist's consciousness-the multiple breaks, in fact. Consider the pirates, here supplied by the vile captain and crew of the Ipecacuanha. Consider the name Ipecacuanha, signifying an emetic and purgative: the break in consciousness is going to have a nastily physical side to it, of a possibly medicinal kind. Consider the fluid boundaries between animal and human. Consider the island.

5. THE ENCHANTED ISLAND.

The name given to the island by Wells is n.o.ble's Island, a patent irony as well as another poke at the cla.s.s system. Say it quickly and slur a little, and it's no blessed island.

This island has many literary antecedents and several descendants. Foremost among the latter is William Golding's island in Lord of the Flies-a book that owes something to The Island of Doctor Moreau, as well as to those adventure books Coral Island and The Swiss Family Robinson, and of course to the great original s.h.i.+pwreck-on-an-island cla.s.sic, Robinson Crusoe. Moreau could be thought of as one in a long line of island-castaway books.

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 Prend.i.c.k 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 chast.i.ty 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 s.e.xual.

What is it that leads us to believe that Prend.i.c.k 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d of whim and pain. But he isn't a real G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion." He wants to know everything. He wishes to discover the secrets of life. His ambition is to be as G.o.d 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 s.e.x 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 pa.s.sion. So would Oscar Wilde's Lord Henry Wotton, of that earlier fin-de-siecle transformation novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.) But in Christianity, G.o.d 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-G.o.d.

Montgomery, his alcoholic a.s.sistant, 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 Prend.i.c.k 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 Prend.i.c.k 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-G.o.d 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 "prost.i.tute." This is Montgomery's allusion when he says-while the puma is yelling under the knife-"I'm d.a.m.ned ... if this place is not as bad as Gower Street-with its cats." Prend.i.c.k himself makes the connection explicit on his return to London when he s.h.i.+es 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 s.e.xual emanc.i.p.ation, 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 s.e.xual 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 fas.h.i.+on in The Jungle Book.

Kipling made the Law sound kind of n.o.ble 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, G.o.d-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 h.e.l.lish sort. It's no accident that most (although not all) of the beast folk are black or brown, that they are at first thought by Prend.i.c.k 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 Prend.i.c.k 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 Prend.i.c.k 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 Prend.i.c.k.

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 G.o.d who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

In The Ancient Marinerlike pattern at the end of The Island of Doctor Moreau, the "albatross" is still alive. It has suffered no harm at the hands of Prend.i.c.k. 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 Prend.i.c.k 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 Prend.i.c.k? It can perhaps best be understood in reference to The Ancient Mariner. The G.o.d of Moreau's island can scarcely be described as a dear G.o.d who makes and loves all creatures. If Moreau is seen to stand for a version of G.o.d the Creator who "makes" living things, he has done, in Prend.i.c.k's final view, a very bad job. Similarly, if G.o.d can be considered as a sort of Moreau, and if the equation "Moreau is to his animals as G.o.d is to man" may stand, then G.o.d 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.

Prend.i.c.k 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l. 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."

Prend.i.c.k 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, s.e.xless, 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.