(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Joseph Heiné - "Madeira polka" on bright bells)
non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Hello, this is Chrononauts, I'm JM, here with Gretchen and Nate, and we're doing medical experimentation of the 19th century. If you want to hear the intro, definitely listen to the previous installment where we also discussed the story :Under the Knife" by H.G. Wells. And we are actually sticking with H.G. Wells because that story was really short. And we have decided that we were going to cover most, if not all, of Wells' major science fiction works on the podcast at some point. And this one was kind of high on the list, The Island of Dr. Moreau. So that's the one we're going to talk about.
So he was already an extremely active writer at this time in 1896. He had already published three novels, a book of short stories and three works of nonfiction along with lots and lots of magazine articles. Of course, much stuff had already appeared in the papers, and he was working on something like three novel manuscripts concurrently, including "The Invisible Man" and "War of the Worlds".
There might be reasons for this huge spurt of activity. As discussed in the previous installment at the time, he was suffering from poor health, possibly tuberculosis, and wasn't sure he'd make it into the 20th century. As it is, he ended up recovering in a new environment outside of London in 1900 and living for 46 more intensely productive years. That means he saw both world wars and was extremely active, traveled all over the world, engaged in many, many extramarital affairs along with his two marriages, full of opinions and full of observations about the world, and sometimes this translated into really cool, thoughtful fiction. Sometimes it was just polemics, and it's kind of really interesting to get into. I mean, at some point I'd like to read probably most of Wells' novels. I'm prepared for some of them not to be very good, but I think some of them, besides the ones that I've read, and I've read mostly the science fiction works, a bunch of the short stories, obviously the stuff we've done on the podcast, but pretty much all the major science fiction works, but not much of the other stuff. Many of his novels don't really fit into our genre. So all told, I think H.G. Wells has something like 50 novels or something like that. There's a lot.
It's basically only these first five. Well, they're not really the first five, because there was a lot of stuff in between those as well, which we'll talk about in a moment, but... So these five science fiction novels, plus maybe "When the Sleeper Wakes" and "The Shape of Things to Come", seem to be the only ones that people mostly talk about now. This was the scientific romance period for Wells, and he was one of those guys who kind of looked down on his early work later in life. I think it was mostly not because he disowned the work, per se. My interpretation, anyway, is that it was more like, well, I've done so much since. Why do you keep wanting to talk about "The Island of Doctor Moreau" That was like my second or third published novel, right? So I don't know. I get it, kind of. We'll talk about it later, but he actually did see the film adaptation, the first major film adaptation of this work. Not a fan of it.
Nate:
No.
JM:
Not a fan. He didn't like it. But in any case, working on so many books at this time, and your bad health and a failing marriage, it's quite amazing it even got done, and he even managed to rewrite it. So the original manuscript, which you can find in the Variorum edition of Moreau, published by the University of Athens. That's the Athens of Georgia, not the Greek Athens.
Nate:
Or New York.
JM:
It was just to be titled Mourget. And it was the name of the doctor character originally, later changed to Moreau. So there were a lot of changes, but Dr. Moreau remained essentially French, I suppose. But in this original version, Moreau had a family, Mrs. Moreau had a son, and there was no Pendrick, er Prendick... So I always get that name. I find that hard to say. I don't know about you guys.
Gretchen:
I also always want to read it as Prendic, er Pendrick, but I always...
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I'm assuming that's why he's not called that in any of the movie adaptations.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And it's hard to write too. I kept writing Pendrick and stuff like that. I don't know. This is a funny word there, but...
Gretchen:
It's like when you read The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, and you always want to say Ford Perfect, but it's not that.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
But yeah, there's still the essential characters from the final version are still there. There is more of them. But the story seems to have been a bit more over the top originally. And there's some moralizing on the perils of drinking and alcoholism, a little which is retained in the final version in the form of Montgomery and the ship's captain. But it's not nearly as hammered on. And this kind of hammering of opinions is something that Wells was always proud to and would be negatively known for, occasionally, especially later on. But I will say he's not in bad company. A lot of other science fiction writers that are rather popular might be prone to this as well. I'm not mentioning names now, but maybe we'll come to them at some later time. So that might also influence his view on the film version, for example. Because he seemed to see film as a propaganda tool of some sort, according to his biographer Michael Sheldon.
I don't know. There's a lot to analyze about this guy. He's a very busy person with a lot going on. But we have a similar situation here with "Time Machine" and "The Chronic Argonauts", where the concept was used for something else, only Moreau/Mourget was quite a bit closer to the eventual book published in 1896. So the original draft comes from sometime in 1894 and cuts off about six chapters or so, and pretty much in mid-scene.
So I'll pause for a moment here and mention again the Variorum edition. If you're really interested in learning about the process of writing this book, the influences on this book, every single textual change that ever occurred in any manuscript of this book, the literary children of this book, the adaptations and stage and film of this book, get the Variorum edition. It is one of the most thorough things I have ever seen, and the persons that put this together, Mr. Robert Philmus, mostly, points out that this is the first work of this nature for a science fiction novel. I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems like it might be. Like, I mean, the Penguin version of "Connecticut Yankee" has nice notes and an introduction and stuff like that, but it's not nearly as thorough as this. This is really exhaustive, and it includes that entire first draft, which apparently he had to hand copy or something like that. I don't know, this thing came out in around 1996, so it would have been the 100th anniversary of Moreau. So, they obviously went all out for this, and I've never seen anything like it for this kind of work, which is pretty cool. I mean, I'm sure, I guess I shouldn't really say that because there's like special versions of Frank Herbert's "Dune", apparently, that include a whole lot of extra stuff. Anyway, this is quite something special, so if you, I don't even know that the other early Wells science fiction classics have had this treatment. Maybe they have something to look into for the future, maybe when we do "War of the Worlds" and "The Invisible Man".
Nate:
Yeah, we still have a bunch of his major novels still yet to cover, which I'm definitely excited to do when we do them because I haven't read "Invisible Man". The last time I read "War of the Worlds", I think was like 20 years ago, so it's been a while, so yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I've not read "Invisible Man" either. So far, I've only read "War of the Worlds", and reading this was my second time reading "Dr. Moreau".
Nate:
Yeah, I really like "First Men on the Moon", which I've read twice now, and "Time Machine" is great. And certainly, yeah, pretty much everything we've done by him, it's been really enjoyable.
JM:
Yeah. Before we talk about our views of it now, I just wanted to say that the chapter Moreau explains, which is in the original and quite modified in the final version, but it got partially rewritten in a speculative essay, "The Limits of Human Plasticity" in the January 1895, issue of the Saturday Review. And the book was originally sent to Methuen, and Wells was actively courting several different publishers at this time to get as many books out in close proximity as possible. And Methuen rejected the book as being too gruesome, which Wells seems to have understood a little bit, that eventually went to William Heinemann, who put out the first British edition.
So the book met with some pretty unfavorable reviews at the time. The Times said, "the book should be kept out of the way of young people, and avoided by all who have good taste, good feeling, and feeble nerves."
Nate:
I mean, nowadays that's the kind of press you want for a horror story.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, the 1890s sensibilities. They published it though. When "The Island of Souls" came out, that was apparently banned in Britain for like 25 years. I don't really see how the movie is so much more gruesome than the books, but maybe you guys can talk about that, or we can all talk about that when we get to that discussion. But yeah, reviews said, and they had spoken favorably on "The Time Machine" before, and they said, "the book ought not to have been written, and Mr. Wells shouldn't withdraw it from circulation."
Meanwhile, the Saturday Review said, and this is my favorite one, "the author has sought out revolting detail with the zeal of a sanitary inspector probing a crowded graveyard." Meanwhile though, the Anglican Guardian, later known as simply the Guardian, was more understanding, and although the anonymous critic called the book "exceedingly ghastly, unpleasant, and painful," they also thought that "Wells exceeded in his aim to, on the one hand, satirize and rebuke the presumption of science, and on the other, cast contempt upon the dealings of God with his creatures."
And I think it's pretty clear from this book too that Wells was commenting on the thin veneer of civilization, and this is handled a bit more subtly in the rewrite than the unfinished original, where it's laid on pretty thick and a bit blatantly, especially the racial stuff, which we'll talk to you a little bit about a little bit later. I think Wells was definitely trying to make a point here very deliberately, and I don't know if we think it's a good thing that he toned it down or not, but I tend to think that it probably is.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, if there's one fault with the novel, it's that stuff, it fortunately doesn't really play a huge portion of the text, but you know, it is a bit uncomfortable when it is there.
JM:
I think, yeah, I mean, I think he toned it down. And that leads to some confusion about the purpose of it. But I think that also, like, it's so, I don't know, it's more in your face in the original. And that, that could be both a good and a bad thing because it's a bit more clear maybe that he was meaning to like, satirize imperialist attitudes. I don't know, but it still comes across, I think a little heavy-headed. Like, maybe you should be heavy-headed about that kind of stuff. I don't know.
Gretchen:
I mean, I think that it's very like, you can see what he's going for. I just feel like maybe the execution was kind of fumbled in the way that it's handled.
JM:
Yeah, I can definitely understand that. I think that, I don't know, we'll get there, we'll point it out when we go through the summary, but I think that actually it gets less pervasive as the book goes on. So, again, I think there's a certain pointer to a deliberate quality in this. Whether we agree that it's subtle or not, I think that his intentions were good, but I don't know. Yeah, and we also get to see one of Moreau's experiments performed in the laboratory in the original, which doesn't happen. I think he pretty much just decided, yeah, this is too much, so....
But he explained this thing about the veneer of civilization concurrently in an article called "Human Evolution and Artificial Process", which you can also find in the Variorum edition of the Island of Dr. Moreau, because why wouldn't it be there? I'm telling you, it's like three times the length of the actual model. It's incredible.
Nate:
Yeah, no, that's great.
JM:
Yeah, but he describes how humans have not physically evolved much since the Stone Age times, but instead in a culture and civilization that has evolved to provide humanity with both benefits and intense stresses. So, in several sources that I came across commenting on this text, this quote is used in connection with Moreau.
So what he says in the essay is, "what we call morality becomes the padding of suggested emotional habits necessary to keep the round Paleolithic savage in the square hole of the civilized state. And sin is the conflict of the two factors, as I have tried to convey in my Island of Dr. Moreau."
So, yeah, I think it's pretty clear what we're dealing with here and some of the influences that are on this book. In the contemporary times, obviously, the perception of science as that reviewer said, but also some literary influences. I don't know, before we kind of briefly talk about those, I wonder, yeah, so we all enjoyed this, right?
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, like I said, I think the only for the issue with how the races are handled. I get what he's trying to say of Moreau being this colonizing force and kind of oppressing the peoples from out the world and literally morphing them into laborers and workers and physically transforming them and all that. But at the same time, the direct comparison of people to animals is definitely a bit uncomfortable to read in this day in age. But I think generally speaking, this was a really good novel. Suspenseful, it has a lot of awesome horror scenes. Moreau is a great character and the beastmen are generally unsettling. I mean, like, I don't know, it's kind of definitely that uncanny valley thing where it kind of feels fundamentally wrong. And one aspect, I guess we'll talk about that later, are the film adaptations that a lot of them failed to capture, even the good adaptations.
Gretchen:
I watched "Island of Lost Souls", rewatched. I had already seen it before in the 70s version. I watched part of the 90s version. I didn't watch as much as that one, mostly was focused on the production of that. But yeah, I don't think any of them, they don't capture just how I had pictured the novel, the essence of that. Like you were saying that uncanniness to them. And I really liked that aspect of this novel. So I really enjoyed the whole atmosphere and yeah, the horror of this novel, the way that everything is described is really great.
Nate:
It definitely has a lot of obvious literary influences, too. We've been talking about "Frankenstein" earlier, that's certainly here, but also "Robinson Crusoe" with the whole shipwreck element. We've seen similar tales play out in Edgar Allan's Poe, "The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I was just going to mention that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, especially kind of the beginning, that raft scene.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. Which I'm glad he put that there, this intense quarrel right off the bat before we even get to the island.
Gretchen:
Yeah, well even before they get to the island, there's a lot of beastly behavior from people in this novel.
JM:
So I think part of the, I guess, the interesting fun kind of thing where Wells is like later on in life, sometimes annoyed with people always want to talk about these really old books that he wrote, that atmospheric quality, that like the inescapable fact that although maybe it was important to him that he had something to say, I still think the most memorable aspect of the book is its atmosphere. And I think that maybe later on in his life, he might have found that a fault rather than a strength. And now we're like, yeah, but you know, now it's 2024 and we're going to read this, we're not going to read "Portrait of a Lady". I haven't read too much of that stuff either, so it's all out there though, so you can find it and read it and decide for yourself.
But it's just interesting that a man who is so prolific and did so much and would have liked to be remembered for something else probably mostly is most remembered for stuff like this. Because I found this, yeah, this is a weird story. It's dark. It's kind of dreamlike too, in a way, like "Under the Knife". Even though it's not, I think he's aiming for something that he found plausible and then he actually, there's a whole appendix in the very original edition again, where he's just defending Moreau against detractors and people who are like, this is impossible. You couldn't do this and stuff like that. And yeah, it does seem that way. Like, how the hell do you do brain surgery on animals like this? Like, you know, we couldn't do this now, let alone in 1896, right? But he felt the need to stand out for it, I guess, that time. So, but yeah, it's a weird story. It's dark. It's and the influence is, yeah, Poe for sure. They're definitely reminded of Pym a couple of times. Absolutely.
Also, one of the ones that I saw pointed out a lot was "Gulliver's Travels" and especially the last book. When Gulliver comes back from hanging out with the Houyhnhnms. The end of Moreau definitely mirrors that section. As Tom Shippey points out in "Hard Reading", one of the many cool academic essays in there with his distinctive style, he points out that we are supposed to think that Gulliver is mad at the end of Gulliver's Travels. So, you don't have to take his feelings about humanity that seriously. But Wells is actually asking you to ,and he does make it convincing, I think. And, you know, certain things you can chuckle at a bit with this and things that happen offscreen that seem kind of quick. I guess that it would have been all right to get more into, but I think it does kind of all fit with the atmosphere of this book.
So, why don't we go through the summary then and we'll talk about what happens in this book. And, again, you can easily read this book as so many editions are available of this book, including e-books. So, we encourage it. It's really short. Actually, all these early Wells SF works are pretty short. Not, I don't know, I guess "War of the Worlds"i s a little longer. But for the most part, yeah, like this is just a little bit longer than a time machine, I think, which definitely be called a novella nowadays.
Nate:
Yeah, this is 40,000 words. It was also republished in Amazing in the 20s, so I think Hugo had a whole bunch of rights to H.G. Wells stuff. But yeah, only serialized across two issues, so it's not really that long of a novel.
JM:
All right, well, let's get into it.
(music: rhythmic thumping, wireless telegraph)
spoiler plot summary and discussion
JM:
We start with an intro that is actually not in all the editions of this book. Wells himself decided to take it out on some of the later editions, which I think was an interesting choice that I don't necessarily disagree with. It's so weird how, I mean, it's not like you don't see it nowadays, but in a lot of novels in the 1800s, there has to be at least one frame or something to fit the novel into. And it almost seems like, you know, when I was younger, that really pissed me off. And I was like, why do we only have to have that? Like, why is it necessary, right?
Gretchen:
Why does there always have to be like a person writing their sister to tell them about a story someone told them?
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I forget which one it was, was "The Mummy" or "The Last Man" where it was like somebody wrote a whole bunch of things on leaves or something like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that's the last man. I remember reading that for one of my courses. I do remember that.
JM:
So I eventually did come to see the value of it, and I kind of started to appreciate why it was done. Sometimes it can be done to offer an interesting perspective on the story you're about to read, and that's a cool thing to have. But sometimes I still think maybe it's not necessary. And here, I don't really see the point in having it be the manuscript found by Prendick's nephew. So, I mean, okay, "House on the Borderland" had a device like this too, and you could almost say that was unnecessary too. But it was a couple of chapters and it added a lot to it. It really helped to set the atmosphere and the mood very well.
Gretchen:
I do think that in "House on the Borderland", it's because it's kind of supposed to emphasize that very like transitory nature that we see later on through that voyage that he has. You know, things are going to wither and decay and they find the manuscript that's left over from where this house used to be. I think it kind of works for that.
Nate:
It doesn't really serve too much purpose here, but I guess it's also he didn't go the other way of like "Erewhon" and put a like and subscribe at the end of it or something like that.
JM:
I've been thinking about that lately because one of the stories we're doing next time is a very short story, like much, much shorter than this, but it also has a frame. And it's really interesting the way that is used too, and I think like a cool way to for Moreau to have done this maybe would it be to have like the frame talk about how I don't know. This guy's house burned down or something like that. And they went to look at his house to figure out what was up with this house and how to salvage anything that was there. And the strange stuff that this guy had and his weird habits that nobody could explain. Then they found the manuscript and are like, oh, I guess that explains everything. That would have been kind of neat, but Wells gave us this.
So we have Edward Prendick is a man of private means and he's a student of natural history and biology who like Wells study under T.H. Huxley. And Edward Prendick's nephew, Charles is publishing the manuscript found in his uncle's possession. And Pendrick, Prendick was..., they changed the name of the character in all the film versions. And at first it was like, why did they do that? What's the point? And now trying to say it so much. Yeah, I get it. Okay. Parker, why not?
But Edward Prendick was found a drift somewhere in the Pacific on a lifeboat. And he had set sail on the Lady Vain, a ship that was wrecked, presumed no survivors and turned up 11 months later in early 1888. And he rambled strange stories about an island and mysterious creatures. And when the island believed to be Nobles Island was visited a few years later. It was definitely uninhabited, though it seems some of the animal life was quite strange. When the Lady Vain was wrecked, Edward and two other men got into a longboat while the rest of the surviving crew got into the big launch. And they were picked up by another ship later, but the men in the little dinghy were forced to fend for themselves. And the other passenger and the sailor who were on the little boat with him, get into a fight and fall overboard after a week of starving and water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
Nate:
Definitely very "Pym" here.
JM:
Yeah, so that was an influence as well, no doubt about it. But also "The Tempest", that always comes up. So the subject of cannibalism on the high seas does come up and they were drawing lots, so you know things were serious. And it's a bit later that Edward, now alone, gets picked up by the schooner Ipecacuanha, which is apparently a South American shrub with emetic, diaphoretic and perjative qualities. So really great name for a ship there. That's really funny.
Wells sneaks in all this humorous stuff into the book sometimes that just kind of makes you laugh if you... I didn't know what that was, but there is a note about it explaining what an Ipecacuanha is. And it's like, oh, okay. Very interesting.
So after this gruesome novel, his next book was "The Wheels of Chance", which was a comic novel. And that one was dedicated to his mother. So he was trying to make up for this, I guess. Edward comes to in a cabin, tended by a big scruffy guy named Montgomery. And this guy is a former medical student who apparently isolates himself on a nameless island in the middle of nowhere. And he's a passenger on the schooner, and he's going to be dropped off on an island with some cargo. And we don't know what that might be yet, but we do hear a lot of growling and stopping and howling from above. So we can assume that it's animals of some kind. And actually, that was mentioned in the introduction that the Ipecacuanha was trading in zoological specimens. So yeah, Montgomery can't get these specimens to be quiet. So while he's trying to talk to Edward, he apparently beats something. It doesn't quiet whatever it is for long.
So Montgomery doesn't want to talk to Edward about what he's doing, but he does have a menagerie on board. And Edward eventually sees it. Several big dogs, a puma, some rabbits, and a llama. And there's also this hideous-looking man who either the dogs or the crew like. Or at least Edward thinks the man is hideous-looking. And this is the kind of uncomfortable stuff in the book that the way that the, I guess, animal is described is... I don't know, it feels kind of like a racial caricature almost.
Nate:
Yeah, it definitely is, yeah.
JM:
But yeah, and I mean, this was a lot more heavy in the original draft. And he was obviously trying to get at something here. So the captain beats this guy for going aft. And he, that is the captain, almost gets it from Montgomery, who's also drunk. Before Edward steps in and tells him to shut up. And the captain doesn't like that at all, so...
Gretchen:
The captain will very much remember that moment.
JM:
Right, yeah. And here, again, we got sort of remnants of this thing that Wells was harping about at first, where he was likening the moral degradation of alcoholism to bestiality of some kind. And that's definitely dropped up in, but the drunken captain is actually pretty funny, I don't know. I'm sure he was a very shitty person, but I enjoyed him anyway.
Gretchen:
He is entertaining.
JM:
And we're just taken by the atmosphere as he and Montgomery hang out. And he wonders at how Montgomery hungers for news of London and wants to talk about it. And they smoke cigars and chat for hours. Then when Edward wants to thank his rescuer, Montgomery gets really moody and he says it was just a chance. And he almost tells of how he made a mistake 11 years ago that apparently had the effect of exiling him from society. But thinks better of it. Now, when they reached the island of the Sawbones, as the captain calls it, he, still pretty drunk, yells that they all go overboard. And the guy who brought a launch from the island, who turns out to be Moreau, flatly refuses to take Edward on the island. So some of the sailors toss him into the waterlogged dinghy from the Lady Vain and set him adrift.
Here it seems that Montgomery might have saved him again, maybe. There are some odd looking, well, animal men hanging out on the beach and unloading the stuff. They haul in Edward's dinghy and Moreau questions him and eventually agrees to feed him breakfast. So that's cool.
So there's talk about the animal man or beast folk at this point. We get a lot of digressions about them throughout the book and talking about them, their mannerisms and how they look. It's really interesting because Edward's thought processes about them are very contradictory. I'm sure Wells knows this. It's a frustrating thing about the character. And it really depends on how you're used to seeing characters in these kind of books. But Edward Prendick is no hero. That's for sure. He's really not.
His behavior throughout this book was pretty funny, I guess, in a lot of ways. And I don't know, again, I think Wells is trying to make a point here. I don't think he's necessarily wanting us to totally get in the head of Edward and totally empathize with him in every way, necessarily. Now, I'm going to bring up an influence later that I might have also picked up on this and that's Rudyard Kipling. But we'll talk about that in a minute.
Moreau is interested in cultivating Edward. Why exactly? Well, we feel like he's up to something, particularly after he was so quick to turn him away before. And this is the kind of thing that a couple of the movie versions play up a little bit. It's almost like a trick. There's supposed to be a revelation about what Moreau is actually doing. And I guess this version of Moreau is less over the top than the original version. So we don't get to see, for example, Moreau experimenting on Edward to turn him into an animal, which does happen in one of the movie versions of this.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah......
JM:
Yeah. It wouldn't have necessarily been a bad thing if that happened. You're just taking this book to another level of exploitational weirdness, I guess, I don't know. That's what happens in the American International Pictures version of the Island of Dr. Moreau with Burt Lancaster and Michael York.
So after some more dithering, they put him in what I think is Montgomery's room. And that's when upon seeing Montgomery's, quote, crippled servant has pointed animal ears and hearing the doctor's name, Edward remembers who he is, a famous surgeon and vivisectionist. And the journalist busted him treating animals with apparent extreme cruelty. There was one dog in particular that was found. And I don't know if there were photographs in the newspapers at that time. I guess there probably were. Maybe it would have been too gruesome to print, though. So they probably wouldn't have done that. But they really, really worked on people's sympathies here and justifiably got it. So he was held out of town.
Edward, though, thought that that treatment was sort of unfair and doesn't really see the big deal in vivisection for research purposes. And he doesn't really understand the excessive secrecy of the place, either, with Moreau comparing a locked inner room to Bluebeard's chamber. Edward mustn't go in there. And like Bluebeard's wives, you know he will.
So, yes, Edward is kind of annoying about the animal men. He goes on about how unnatural they are. But this must have been with the men on the Ipecacuanha, how it felt, too. Sort of this uncanny valley thing, I guess. It doesn't have to be machines, this bestial aspect. The borderline between civilized man and something else. You kind of see that in certain things like the Silurians Doctor Who story, for example, where the characters just seem to lose their minds when they see some kind of weird throwback thing. And they're like, oh no, this is too much to handle. And like breaking our psyches, because it's such an existential threat.
But Montgomery claims he doesn't see it. And he doesn't even notice the guy's pointy ears. But Edward feels he's lying. And they can hear the puma screaming in the dissection room. Montgomery admits that he also is a drunk. And that has something to do with the disgrace background the same time Moreau had to leave England. So, I don't know, I'm assuming he killed somebody under the knife, basically. I think that's what happened.
So, he drinks whiskey as the puma cries in abject pain. Montgomery's nerves eventually break and he makes his excuses while Edward becomes more and more agitated. I'm sure Montgomery has gone to wherever to pass out. He doesn't even have his room anymore.
You know what, they're so nice to Edward. I'm sorry. These are shitty mean people, but they're so nice to Edward. And I think that's also part of Wells's commentary, honestly.
Nate:
British hospitality.
JM:
Gentlemen's code and you have to be nice to this guy and he's like, we didn't ask for him to be here. Here, take my bedroom. Like, my hammock is yours. Oh, don't mind the puma screaming in the corner.
Nate:
Have some brandy.
JM:
Yeah, it is hilarious. I don't know. It just really cracked me up this time. Not in a bad way, but it's just like, oh, yes. I didn't really think about that the first time I read the book, but yeah.
Gretchen:
Just, you know, having a very polite dinner while there's just horrible sounds of suffering in the background.
JM:
Edward goes for a walk and he discovers a man on all fours drinking from a stream who looks guilty when he realizes he's been spotted. And later the sight of a decapitated rabbit and the sounds of the forest start to spook him and he gets sort of lost. He comes up on a circle of three or four of the native men who seem to be chanting or conducting some sort of ritual. And by native men, I mean the animal hybrids that Dr. Moreau has created. But I guess they are pretty much native to the island because nobody else seems to live there.
You can't understand their speech. He keeps trying to reason with himself that there's nothing I've missed with them and that they're just men like himself. But he can't quite bring himself to believe it. And he gets spooked when he feels he's being pursued and brains one of the animal men with a slingshot.
Well, the cry of the puma is almost a relief now once he makes it back to the base. And Montgomery is all apologetic even though I don't think he needs to be at all. Edward's just watering all over the place and hanging out on their perfect island and getting into trouble. And now when he walks in on what looks like a vivisection of a human being after hearing lots of different pain cries. So Moreau is real mad and throws him across the room like a tiny doll thing and they lock him in his room.
Gretchen:
He's grounded.
JM:
Yes, bad boy. That does it for Edward and he's on the run and he escaped somehow. I forget how, but he now thinks they've just been nice to him to make him unwary and prepare him for a vivisection. And indeed there's some slight hints that that's what might be Moreau's intentions. Stuff like saying, oh, I was not ready to deal with you yet. And that sort of thing. What could that possibly mean?
Out in the forest again encountering a sort of monkey man who seems affable and for some reason doesn't encourage abhorrence in Edward. And this ape man chatters some rudimentary English and takes him to his home in a chasm somewhere. So his new friend introduces him to the other beast people and he's again sort of repulsed by most of them. And the leader is a gray sloth like thing and Edward talks about having the gestures of a sloth. But I don't know, does a sloth really have those?
Nate:
Yeah, I'd say so. Really weird animals.
JM:
The gestures of a sloth.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I've seen them the way that they move. They have a very distinct way of like.
JM:
They're too lazy. They're too lazy to have anything like that. They're sloths.
Nate:
They've got personality, even if they don't move. I don't know if you've ever read that novel, "Oblomov", where it takes them like 300 pages just to get out of bed. But you know, there's a lot there. Yeah, you guys heard the St. Vitus song, the sloth?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Beware the sloth. It always cracks me up too. I don't know. Oh no, the sloth.
It gets swept up in the saying of the law, which is an almost religious rite where the law is spelled aloud. And it's mostly prohibition against animal behavior. Not walking on all fours, not sucking up drink, not chasing after other, quote, men, not eating meat or fish. Then there's praise and fear chants that talk of Him. Edward isn't sure who He is, but we have a pretty good idea that as he suspects, it's Moreau, who is like a god to these people.
Moreau and Montgomery have been tracking him down all this time, and there's baying dogs interrupting the ritual. And Edward is truly on the run now. He knows he can't count on the beast's people for anything, even though it was as if they were going to make him one of them.
He falls into a ravine and hurts himself, but he leaves them on a chase for a while, and eventually they catch up naturally. He thinks it's men that are being vivisected, but Moreau, very patient, explains to him that he's got it backwards, even though they build huts and things and they talk. They're animals, not men. He says in very bad Latin.
Gretchen:
I will say that before the context of the 70s version where he is turned into an animal, I did not have that in mind. I thought like Moreau was not going to vivisect him. During this scene, it is very funny that Prendick is about to drown himself, hysterical, yelling at the rest of the beast men. The other two are just like, you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know anything right now.
Nate:
They even give up their guns and is like, here, take this fully loaded pistol and do whatever you want with it.
Gretchen:
Prendick, you have no idea what's going on.
JM:
Right. It's really funny because I saw the way this probably should have been written out in Latin. And the way he read it in Latin is more like what I remember of Latin because I don't remember that much Latin. I took like three years of Latin in high school. So to have him say it the way he said it makes more sense to me even though it's not the correct way to write it. And the reason I know about all this is also, again, Tom should be at his essay about Moreau where he talks about this. And he also thinks that Wells was condemning classical education throughout this book and saying that it was useless. And there's some slight indications of that in the book now. I don't know how serious that is. I think it might have even been just something unconscious he was doing. I don't know if that was really one of his intentions, but he said that any schoolboy in 1896, any British schoolboy who used that kind of Latin would have probably been caned.
Nate:
I mean, there's pretty much in every Victorian novel I read Latin phrases sprinkled throughout. It's definitely a very common thing for those 19th century British novels to do. I've never really dug too deep in the language myself. The Duolingo course is woefully inadequate, I think. I do have a couple of textbooks that I'll eventually want to get into. But Latin grammatically still retains a case system, which pretty much all the modern Romance languages, I think except for Romanian have dropped just because it's so convoluted and complex. So yeah, it's kind of a major challenge to get started. But it is one thing I would like to learn because there's obviously a lot of Latin influence on literature in general.
JM:
Definitely part of the education for most British school children at that time.
Nate:
Oh yeah, and I imagine most Europeans in general. I mean, keep in mind Latin was still the liturgical language of the Catholic Church. And even though England separated from that in a really weird way, and even though scientific Latin had been on the decline for centuries, it was still something that was, I'd imagine, going to be a part of any French or German person's education as well as an English person.
JM:
Yeah, interesting. So I don't know, you know, I got another point in the book. He's staying in, I guess, Montgomery's room and he looks at the bookshelf. And it's like a bunch of Homer and Latin stuff that he says he doesn't really read very well. So like the rest of its scientific texts. So no good reading for Edward. I think he's disappointed by the reading material by the given provided to him by his very nice hosts on the island.
He distrusts Moreau, but Montgomery who keeps acting like Edwards just being a silly ass. That's his favorite expression. He's always calling him a silly ass. And he's right. He has a point. I mean, don't get me wrong. These two guys are horrible, but I feel for Montgomery. He just drinks himself into a stupor so he doesn't feel anything. And I guess that's what he feels like he has to do. But he does get through eventually and explains that these are animals.
Meanwhile, though, they're hearing all this and Edward thinks they really look like they're thinking. And he had been shouting to them and his friends and telling them they were men and they shouldn't fear Moreau. And he could be killed. Now, Moreau explains everything and he gives Edward a lecture on the plasticity of forms and on his work. And it's all very platonic talking about how the form is more important than the physical object that you see. It's kind of funny because last time we did the podcast, I talked about reading "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick. They think they've time-traveled back into like 1938, but then they realize it's not really 1938. It's just an assumed identity of 1938. An interesting, very Philip K. Dick way of looking at things. It's like not really time-travel. It's something else. They've gone into a weird form state or something like that.
Anyway, he's been trying to uplift beasts through basically fancy grafts of some kind. And it's not really gone into. And yeah, you could say the science is you don't really understand how a lot of this could work beyond the mere physical transformation. There's the brain aspect and Wells goes through a lot of hoops to try to defend himself on all this. So it's a thing. I mean, who cares, right? It's a cool story.
Nate:
I don't think getting hung up on the science really is the point of this novel. And unfortunately, it does present itself in a deus ex machina and a bit, which I don't think is a bit anti-climactic kind of. But at the same time, it does feed into the themes that Wells is trying to present. So I guess it works out okay. But yeah, I wouldn't personally get too hung up on the science. I think it's pretty clear what he's trying to accomplish with it.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, when you look at "Frankenstein", like Mary Shelley doesn't go into any detail.
Nate:
She doesn't mention it at all. The highest level of technology in Frankenstein is the ship that they're on in the framing device at the beginning and in the end.
JM:
Yeah, but she keeps it very vague and I think Wells was more into trying to justify that aspect. But I don't know, it doesn't come across in the book that much. You have to take it for what it is. He uses these weird graphs and a couple of the extra-textual resources I consulted for this pointed this out. And it's not necessarily something I would have necessarily thought of or noticed. But the whiteness of Moreau is always emphasized.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So it seems to be, again, like part of Wells' weird, sort of not that subtle, but maybe on the point commentary about this whole thing.
Nate:
Oh, it's certainly a critique of colonialism. I mean, yeah, it's pretty transparent throughout the entire text.
JM:
Yeah. So Moreau, the threatening and apparently very strong white man, he talks about how pain and pleasure are aspects of the beast, the mark of the beast, if you will. And he says that's what he wants to fight. Not only am I calling back to the Manilla Road song, "Mark of the Beast", by saying that, but also to the Rudyard Kipling story, "Mark of the Beast".
Now, that one wasn't necessarily mentioned in the extra-textual resources, but a story by Kipling that was mentioned was "The Man Who Would Be King", which is a story made into a pretty cool movie in the 70s, starring Sean Connery and Michael Cain, about two British guys who travel to some, I don't remember where it is exactly. Is it somewhere in Africa or maybe it's some island somewhere? I'm sorry, I kept drawing a blank on this at the moment exactly where it is.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. I never read it or saw the movie so...
JM:
Okay, so they go there and they basically decide that they're going to set themselves up like gods. They abuse their privileges and, I don't know, apparently they're Freemasons. Kipling had some axe to grind there or something like that against the Freemasons or something, I don't know. But I saw the movie. It's not a Kipling story I've actually read yet, but it's definitely in the cards. I find Kipling to be a really interesting good writer, but the story "Mark of the Beast" is a very, very, very troubling story about some colonial British people living in India who one day they go on a drunken bender and this one guy has it in his head that he's going to desecrate a temple of Hanuman, basically. This happens and one of the priests of the temple curses him and a mark appears on him and after that he basically turns into a wolfman. It's a story about how these British people essentially have to get their friend back and the way they go about doing this is very troubling and disturbing and it kind of gets to the essence of why Kipling is a challenging reader to read nowadays, but why he's still interesting and probably should be read. Aside from that, of course, he's got really awesome stories like "With the Night Mail" that we covered on the podcast before. That's just a really awesome immersive world building that's so, so good. And his poetry is actually really good too. "The Jungle Book", like it's popular for a reason. And again, that was probably another influence on this, "The Jungle Book", which came out not that long ago, I believe, at the time. I didn't check the actual date when that came out, but Wells did speak of his admiration of Kipling at certain points. Kipling was still writing well in the 1910s as well, so I've read a lot of the big Wells biography that I have, but I didn't actually see anything about the two of them actually meeting, but I kind of wondered how well they would have gone on because Kipling was definitely a bit of a conservative fellow and Wells was like a socialist and stuff for the most part. So I don't know, but that's interesting.
But yeah, Moreau says it's only Edward's affinity for the beast that makes him feel and presumably sympathize with creatures and pain. And he recounts his failed experiments, one of which was a hideous, crawling thing that I sort of regret we didn't get to see in the book, but I would have been adding this cool, creepy, almost Lovecraftian dimension to everything. But this thing was apparently very strong and killed some of the people he initially had with him on the island. And he always thinks he's done great work, but somehow the creatures always disappoint him, reverting to beasthood at which point he tosses them out. And they have to go hang out in the beastfolk communities with their huts and stuff at their own accord. Montgomery has a fondness for the creatures, but Moreau is completely cold toward them and he sees them as nothing but failures. So there follows a discussion of the beastfolk again and their various forms, which are many. They have been hybridized from a good number of species and some are more human-like than others. And there are fewer females than males.
Eventually, Edward is habituated toward them and starts to be unsure how different they are from certain specimens of humanity he's seen. On another trip over the island, Montgomery and Edward come across a mutilated rabbit. And Montgomery realizes that one or more of the beast people have tasted blood, which Edward already knows, because he neglected to mention he saw that on the first day that he was there behind the enclosure. And I guess Montgomery was too drunk to notice and Moreau was too busy torturing animals.
So Moreau, concerned, he summons all the beast people and the prime suspect is the leopard man who stalked Edward on his first solo wandering. And indeed this man, after the weird exultant ritual of the law and the worshiping of Moreau, leads them on a hunt and the other beastfolk seem to enjoy the chase. And indeed their animal natures would appear to be fired up. During this time though, Edward finds himself losing his fear and repugnance of them and sympathizing. So the penalty for bringing the law is to re-return to the house of pain and Moreau wants the leopard man intact, but Edward once again causes this major annoyance by shooting him down instead.
Well, I don't know. We can't blame him though, because like I said, he's starting to sympathize. And that's like, yeah, I think some of the versions of this definitely are amping up the horror aspect of the beast people. But for the most part, I just found them sort of sad and I don't know. I didn't think they were scary necessarily and the situation was scary.
Nate:
More unsettling than scary and I think you are meant to sympathize with them and feel their plight.
JM:
Yeah, it's only natural that a movie that's scared toward horror or something should emphasize that aspect of them. And I do think the book kind of, it can help but use this language of degeneracy to talk about them, make them seem like more of a horror than they really are. I don't know, they just made me feel sad and kind of pathetic. I mean, yeah, a couple of them are really vicious and fierce but like, I mean, their hyenas, what do you expect? The hyenas and leopards.
For many weeks now, Moreau has been working on slash torturing the puma and that she's his new great hope. That beast decides one day it's had enough and it has the strength to rip out its fetters and escape, wounding Edward in the process. Moreau runs after the puma, who's obviously in terrible shape and horribly scarred and rooted. And there's at least one feminist essay that points out that this is some kind of symbol where she, the puma, is running out furiously in tattered bloody rags or something like that. I don't know, this is mentioned in the Shippey book but I didn't actually read the essay that it was quoting so it's kind of interesting that somebody saw that angle in it.
Montgomery goes after Moreau but he can't find him. And he does find that the balance, though, on the island is irrevocably broken. Many of the beast folk have been enjoying the delights of flesh and blood tasting. Even M'ling, Montgomery's servant/attendant/dog, is into the sport and Montgomery has a hard time getting him under control. Montgomery returns to the house and drinks brandy thirstily. All he wants to do now is drink to counter his anxiety. So Moreau is killed offscreen and some of the beast folk point to his body. I don't know if this is a weld thing because I remember in "The Time Machine" kind of being slightly arched that Weena is also killed offscreen. I mean we're supposed to kind of like Weena so I don't know we don't necessarily want to see her disemboweled by the Morlocks but like it's almost like he cared about her so much and he liked her and stuff and then the Morlocks attack and I'm like we can't find Weena anymore and he just kind of oh yeah Weena's gone.
Nate:
Yeah I think her death was well handled but this here I felt it was a little bit anti-climactic.
JM:
I don't know I like the ending for the most part but it's just funny because also the book was already castigated for being super gruesome. So I'm saying like yeah maybe making it more gruesome would have been okay but I don't know.
Gretchen:
Might as well go all in.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And I think maybe if he'd continued on the style of that original draft maybe it would have been but I don't know as it is it seems like the British public in 1896, in some aspects, might not have been ready for this although maybe that was just a critics. It's been shown time and time again that people have different attitudes about that kind of stuff than the establishment or might want to tear it down so maybe this kind of brutal extreme stuff is exactly what people really needed to see in 1896.
So but Edward tries to stave off the chaos a little longer by saying that Moreau isn't really dead, just changed form and now he's looking down upon them. Interesting that he's things that he's playing upon the bestial aspect of these people but what seems to be really playing on is their imagination to me is something that beasts don't have. You know he's like saying oh you know he's not really dead. He's up there somewhere. He's looking down on you judging you like who would come in. I don't know. Animals don't think like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. What species has religion?
JM:
Yeah.
Montgomery is deeply affected though and he demands that Edward drink with him. But he storms out to declare a bank holiday and a drunk party with the beast folk. Edward never drinks with Montgomery because Edward is a teetotaler. This makes Montgomery very mad and in the style of some drunks he's always trying to convince Edward that drinking would be a really good idea. It's pretty funny. I found it amusing because that is kind of a thing and that's one reason why people who decide that they have to become sober often have to end things with some of their friends because just they won't stop.
Gretchen:
I also like Montgomery gets the beast to sing some sort of song against Prendick.
JM:
Yeah. Of course it does get out of hand and Edward has a big idea of leaving in one of the boats. But Montgomery has smashed them and there was apparently a fight for the bottle and some savage ripping and tearing and some chanting of "more! more! more!" Hell of a party there with that bottle of brandy. We can't forget that the brandy is after all fallen wine and we know this because yeah a certain... Oh no. What was his name? I forgot. The "Lest Darkness Fall" guy. He invented that stuff.
Nate:
Yeah. I'm sure their quality of brandy is much better than his homebrew stuff from "Lest Darkness Fall". Padway, that was his name. But yeah, I'd imagine Moreau has a stash of fine brandys, madeiras, sherrys, ports, and all that kind of stuff that they were drinking in the British Empire in the 19th century.
JM:
Yeah. It's just funny, I got like Fitz James O'Brien vibes.
Nate:
Oh "The Wondersmith". Yeah.
JM:
The brandy ended up saving the world because they all just passed out and they were not able to. So Fitz James O'Brien was actually speaking in favor of fallen wine. He's an Irishman he should know.
Montgomery is mortally wounded and dies and Edward's arms saying he's sorry and it's actually somewhat poignant I think. I kind of felt bad for this guy throughout even though you know yeah he's like Moreau's assistant and everything like that and obviously coward and incapable of doing anything but I don't know. That's that. The enclosure is now on fire and it's just Edward and the beast folk now and Edward slinks around worthlessly. He can't even feed himself and he has to ask the beast people for help. They don't salute or bow to him even though he has a gun and a whip. There's one a dogman who exhibits traits of loyalty to Edward. He says the others have gone mad and they say there's no master no whip no house of pain anymore. But dogman seems to want to stick by Edward.
For 10 months he lives on the island with the beast folk. And there's one creature, a hyena/swine man mentioned periodically in the text who is a loner on the island and quite savage having tasted blood early on. Edward lives in dread of him and throughout the book, Edward's attitude toward the beast folk has been like I said before very contradictory. So does he sympathize or does he have a whore and the truth is by now he's pretty much one of them. So he goes on about some of his milder ones and their personalities. His dog man and an ape man who he describes as very silly and it's cute. But all this is in the early days. The beast folk are changing for getting the human affectations instilled in them by Moreau.
Gretchen:
The stubborn beast flesh.
JM:
Yes.
Nate:
Yeah, this is the part that definitely felt deus ex machina to me. I don't know if this reversion didn't really work though. I could see how it has a point in the plot. I don't know just the execution feels very abrupt and again anticlimactic how it's written here.
JM:
Yeah, I mean I don't know. I don't I didn't mind it like I think it could have gone. Yeah, like we could have seen more about how those 10 months went. But at the same time it's like. I don't know again like this whole dream like aspect of the book where it's like it's this is the ending and time is sped up. And we're seeing like okay it's described as degeneration but I can't help but see it as like things returning to I guess the way they should be was probably how a lot of people would see it. It seems like Edward doesn't really fit into any of this even though a part of him probably wants to at this point right.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
I don't know what else but walking on all fours is probably very common and imagine they all suck up their drink now. And for some reason the females seem to evolve more strongly and they stop wearing clothes and monogamy is forgotten. And the beast flesh returns and their hairiness of course and all leave Edward except the dog. Now really a dog.
Edward hopes in vain for a ship. Meanwhile the hand of swine kills the St. Bernard dog, challenging in its bestiality. And it's eventually shot by Edward but he knows he must get off somehow. And again he's not one of our super capable pulp heroes. He's very unhandy though he seems good enough at running and stuff like that.
Nate:
Yeah I like the fact that there were really no heroics in this. It doesn't really suit the story for him to be like a adventurer guy.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah I mean again I think that was deliberately.
Nate:
Oh yeah definitely yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah just to have this very normal average man showing up to the islands. I think it works.
JM:
And he's been so cushioned too by like you know apparently he's very privileged and stuff like that. He has all these private means and stuff and he can just travel around studying natural philosophy. It's cool good for him right but I don't know he's obviously not equipped to handle this stuff. But he does alright in the end. I mean all things considered he doesn't die so that's something. But his attempt to build a raft are pretty unsuccessful. Finally one day he sees an approaching sail and he's ecstatic with hope and tries to get their attention. But we've already read the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and we know by the description of the strangely drifting boat. And the position of the sail that the two still figures at the stern. Of course that must be a derelict of some kind.
So the thing drifts into the bay though and Edward is able to provision and get on it. Very very lucky indeed. And he's picked up after three days. And he doesn't seem to think of mankind as his fellows anymore. He doesn't love the beast people either. "A Man Alone" is the name of the last chapter and is a reflection on how we're all in fact beast people. Walking that fine and tenuous line. And he's consulted with a mental specialist who seems to help a bit. You can't live in London anymore. It's too crowded.
He is fearful of the people around him seeming to see the beast and all of it. Rather like a beast himself. Taking public transit is impossible. Nighttime walks only make things worse. But Edward, still a man of some personal means I suppose. He managed to find a life of solitude and study books, chemistry experiments, and stargazing. So lucky for him that he's in that position. A lot of people probably wouldn't be. But yeah, again, that's the mark of privilege. But I want to read the end of the book because there's a cool final few sentences here. So here's how it ends.
"There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and internal laws of matter. And not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men. That whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope. Or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends."
And so it does.
Nate:
Yeah, great last chapter. A really good note to end the book on, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Right.
Gretchen:
I really liked that last chapter as well. It's very, it's melancholic.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. It fits the mood and the themes, I think.
(music: electronic fluttering)
general discussion and film adaptaions
Nate:
Yeah, overall, this was a really great novel. Didn't know the phrase "house of pain" came from this. So that was kind of neat to learn. But yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I think all this stuff Wells has written that we've covered on the podcast has been great. And this is certainly no exception.
JM:
I think the last chapter is kind of like, again, none of the adaptations of this. They don't really, they go for a different angle.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
There's no romance in this or anything like that.
Gretchen:
No. I know every of the three, I know that there was the silent film, the German silent film. The three major ones that I've seen or have seen parts of usually do include kind of this sort of romance angle.
Nate:
Definitely. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It's really interesting that in the original source, there's not really any of that. There's not this...
JM:
No.
Gretchen:
Very, I think that the anti-climax sort of fits it. This sort of gradual dwindling away.
JM:
Right. And so there's no solace for him to return to either. There's no... So it emphasizes his isolation and the fact that this has existentially changed him. I mean, he was there for like a year, right? So it's cool that it has an impact and he's never going to be the same after this.
Nate:
No, it'd be impossible to be the same. I mean, it's such a weird, surreal experience that had to have been horrifying to go through. How could you be the same after something like that?
JM:
Right.
Nate:
I mean, just like if he had survived the fight on the initial boat and been picked up by the steamer and instead of the guy kicking him off his ship, he just like took him back to Brazil or wherever the ship was bound to. Even that would be a traumatic experience that would take a while to get over, you know, watching two people fight over who gets to be cannibalized.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Just that alone, I'm sure would take years of getting over that trauma, never mind everything he experienced after that point. So definitely could understand why he would want to leave London and civilization behind.
JM:
Again, I think that this is necessary because like even now people can't help but feel that is a lot of humans can't help but feel that we are so separate from other animals, right? Like we are so, we're not like them, we're so on a higher different plane. Okay, maybe it doesn't sound too profound now after another hundred years, but I think it still is because I think that people still can't help but do this and not identifying with your fellow creatures because that can extend to humanity as well. You'll be like, oh, you know, these people may look like men, they may talk like men and act like men, like people, but they're not. They're really more like animals. So we can treat them however we like. That's okay. I think that it's quite powerful thing that needed to be said. And I mean, it's one aspect certainly where this differs a little bit from "Frankenstein" because Moreau is not really creating anything. He's just bastardizing something and making a parody of life by changing it, right? So I mean, I don't know, it's something that comes up a lot later in science fiction too is the whole concept of uplifting other species and giving them the tools that they need to become intelligent, I guess, creatures capable of building a civilization.
Nate:
The whole white savior mentality is pretty much on full display here.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I was about to mention that the white man's burden, the whole idea of colonialism.
JM:
They say it's portrayed as a good thing because it doesn't involve vivisection, right? So it's like, but again, like, where does this science come from? What's the origin of it? The origin of it is taking apart a living creature to see how it ticks. And that hurts.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
We'll be getting into a little bit more of that in a little bit, but I don't know. What else do we want to talk about with this? So the adaptations?
Nate:
There are a lot of adaptations of this. I count eight. I watched four of them. So you guys didn't have a chance to watch the German silent, right? You only watched the 30s, the 70s and the 90s?
JM:
I watched the "Island of Lost Souls" and the 70s one.
Nate:
I just want to briefly talk about the German silent one, which is the second one that was produced. The first one is actually a silent film from the 1910s from France, which is lost. But the German one survives, and I believe it was thought lost for a while, but it recently surfaced. There's a company, Severin Films, who released this one. And there's like a watermark over the entire film, which is kind of annoying, even though it's, you know, cool they released it, but whatever.
It is a bit inaccessible in that the subtitle options are limited. So I watched this in Spanish, but there is a English very clunky dump through, I guess is just Google translate up on YouTube. The Spanish one was done by a person, which I think reads better than the machine English translations on YouTube, but I guess take your pick. The YouTube one is also unfortunately colorized, which I think looks just awful. So again, take your pick.
But there's some interesting things about this film in that the romance aspect that comes in in the 1930s version is very much present here. And the love triangle plays out very much the same way where we get these... I guess it's more of like a love square because there's like four characters involved to women and two men and they all get to the island kind of in the same way.
Unfortunately, the movie has a major racism problem. Moreau, or here it's Thompson's assistant, is a character named Fung-Lu, who is a Chinese character. And while he's actually played by a Chinese actor and not some guy in yellow face, like you'd see in American or British production. He's basically a walking racial stereotype and is like constantly smoking opium throughout the entire film and stuff like that. There's also two black characters, a servant to the party who goes to the island and this tribal woman, and there's like super racist, minstrel show stuff with both the characters over several scenes, and that's basically like their entire involvement with the film. Again, it's kind of uncomfortable to watch.
Moreau is again reduced to an over the top villain and the plot is largely that heroes escaping from Moreau and the Chinese assistant. I have to say the beast characters here are like really unsettling looking and they're probably the best character design of any of the films, I think a lot of the 20s character effects I think in general have this like really, I don't know, again, weird and unsettling look to how they present themselves due to the primitive nature of the film technology and the costuming and stuff like that. The cinematography itself like definitely is not on the same level as a lot of the other German sci-fi and horror films at the time. Like if you're expecting this to be on par with "Faust" or "Metropolis" or "Dr. Caligari", it is not at all. But I don't know, it's hard to recommend this one just because the racism is like really strong. But again, the way the plot unfolds is very similar to the 30s one, which makes me wonder if the people who did the 30s version saw this one first and decided to take elements from it and bring that into that.
So yeah, that's the 20s German one, again, your options for viewing it are limited and not ideal, but it's out there if you want to take a look at it.
JM:
So there's no indication that Wells actually did saw that one. So I don't know.
Nate:
Yeah, I can't imagine he would because again, like I said, the English subtitles just don't officially exist. So I don't think Wells spoke German and it's not like films could widely be distributed back then anyway, people didn't have tape players or anything like that. Never mind the Internet.
JM:
Yeah. Right. But by 1932, the Hollywood film, but I guess also because I mean, the film was apparently didn't get past British censors, but Wells still managed to see it. However, maybe because he was the writer of the book. I don't know. I have no idea. But he did watch it.
Nate:
So yeah, the 30s one was a big budget film, Paramount. So it would have been released in a lot of theaters and it wouldn't have been impossible that Wells would have seen that too much effort.
JM:
So because it didn't make it past the censors. So I just essentially, I guess that means it was never shown in England until the 50s. But maybe H.G. Wells being H.G. Wells, also a globe traveler, I don't know, like he had a screening somehow. So yeah, whatever.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Normally, like, I mean, the British board of censors was notoriously hard on horror films for a long time. And the "Island of Lost Souls" is definitely more of a horror film than anything else.
Nate:
Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like the 30s one a lot. I think it's probably the best out of the film adaptations, even though it doesn't really bear a lot of similarities to the novel.
JM:
I think out of all the adaptations, it has the best reputation for sure.
Nate:
Yeah. But on its own, I mean, taken apart from the novel, it's just a good classic 1930s horror film. Like if you like all the Universal big monster stuff, you'll definitely like this one. I mean, the cinematography is fine in that it shows all the action on the screen and you're not like wondering what's going on. It's nothing to write home about like the good German silents from the 1920s. But it's competent and gets the job done. And we get nice atmosphere of the island. It is cool to see Bela Lugosi. One review on Letterboxd mentioned that the Moreau character has YouTube atheist facial hair, which I thought was a really funny comment. But yeah, overall, this is the 30s one was fun. And I definitely liked it the most out of all the film adaptations.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, I really like the Bela Lugosi appearance there. And I think that, yeah, Charles Laughton does a pretty great job as Moreau. I think he's puts on a good performance.
Nate:
Yeah, it's a lot of fun. And I mean, they do reduce the story a lot, but at the same time, again, it's a 70 minute. Big budget horror movie from the 30s. So I mean, you pretty much know what you're getting when you go into it.
JM:
So Gretchen, I kind of want to get your perspective. How do you feel about watching a film that's like so close to the birth of sound in films?
Gretchen:
Oh, I mean, I enjoy silent films myself. So I think that a lot of the 20s and 30s when sound is first introduced, I enjoy those films very much. Actually, I do like the Universal films. The first time I saw "Island of Lost Souls" was in a collection on the criterion channel of like films put out by Universal that was around.... like, I think it was made for Halloween during that point. So I ended up watching that when they had that in a collection.
Nate:
Yeah. And this is I think a fascinating era for film in the United States in general, because this is pre-code. And there's like a very brief point in time where the silent era ends and before the Hayes code comes in. So you get these films that really do push the envelope a lot. And while no explicit gore is shown on the screen, Dr. Moreau's demise definitely is a lot more unpleasant in this one than is implied in the book. And it's cool that they bring those elements out more.
JM:
Yeah, I think maybe that's part of the reason Wells maybe didn't like it that much. I don't know. I don't think he was approved or anything, but I just think like maybe he thought again, it's his judgment and his maybe not always 100% sound. But I guess kind of understandable perspective that the things he wants to say are more important than the atmosphere, the titillation and the weird vibes of it and stuff like, I don't know that he, by 1932, I don't really think that his head was there. He didn't see that aspect of it as much. And I think he had a very different ideas about films and what they could do. And this was around the time to that Britain produced "Things to Come", which was version of "The Shape of Things to Come", which Wells actually did the screenplay for. And he was very much into the idea of film presenting ideas, basically. And I don't think that the Universal horror films especially impressed him very much.
Nate:
Yeah, you can even tell the marketing of this one. The poster leads off with "The Panther Woman" and the depiction of her is she's topless wearing like very flimsy mini skirt type thing and she's got her arm behind her head in a very seductive pose. So it's putting sex first and foremost where it was not present in the novel whatsoever. So I could definitely see him getting annoyed by the marketing, the presence of the Panther Woman and her prominence in the film versus what the Panther character represents in the novel.
Gretchen:
And it's very interesting to see how that is an element that's lasted with the following adaptations.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Meanwhile, though, you know, who somebody we did mention earlier who considered this one of his favorite movies was Ray Bradbury. He loved this movie. It's on his list of top 10 horror films. That's a thing. I don't know. Yeah, I like it a lot. I mean, it does actually, I don't know, I can't help it. You know, I mean, Nate and I are both around the same age, born in 1980. But, you know, I mean, a lot of time has passed since then, but I still trip out when I watch a film from around the early 30s. I don't know. I just, there's something about that atmosphere that's just so interesting and unique to be experiencing. Oh, it's a film that has sound for, I mean, it's only been around for a few years at this point in films. So, and, you know, you listen to it and it sounds really lo-fi, too. You know, you can't, you can only clean it up so much, right? So it feels like really stepping into another time. And just to think that, yeah, Wells will still be alive for another 15 years when this film was made. So that's pretty cool. Bela Lugosi is in the film. I kind of wish she was there more.
Nate:
Yeah, I do too. Yeah. That is why I want to complain about the film. We need more Bela Lugosi.
Gretchen:
Yeah. He's such a, like, iconic part when he shows up.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, he's the sayer.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, and he was very busy around this time. Very, very busy. So many films, like, between 1931 and 1935 or so, like Bela Lugosi is just always on the go, always busy. So, you know, like, he did "White Zombie" around this time as well, where he played a guy called Murder Legendre. You think he might be a bad guy? Charles Lawton as Moreau. They changed the name of Edward Prendrick to Parker. And that was wise, as I'm sure you all noticed that when I was doing the summary, I just started saying Edward is so much easier.
Nate:
Yeah, right. I think all the film adaptations call him something different.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Maybe? Yeah. I didn't look into it, but I don't think there's consensus on what name they should use other than the one that everybody agrees they should not use.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I can't remember. Is it the 70s or 90s? It's Douglas, I think. I think that might be the 90s.
JM:
Yeah. According to the Variorum Edition, which was produced before the 1990s version of this with Marlon Brando and whoever else, the one that's a notorious train wreck that Richard Stanley walked away from.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
This was as produced first, so it lists a couple of silent entries. It lists a Filipino film called The "Twilight People", which sounds pretty wild. And mostly exploitation, the guy doesn't like it very much, but that's a surprise. But there's also a stage adaptation from 1974. It's actually a very loose adaptation. It sounds kind of interesting. It sounds like a more, I guess, abstract telling of Dr. Moreau in an avant-garde dramatic fashion, but it's a play by a guy called Joel Stone, and the play is called "The Horrors of Dr. Moreau", and a play in four scenes. It was produced under the author's direction at the Jean Cocteau Theater in New York City in 1972. I don't know. It has a bunch of characters, a Prendick, an ape man, a pig woman, a tiger woman, and the sayer of the law. And then it has commentary from The Voice of Moreau. I wasn't able to find a production of this on YouTube or anything like that, but it sounds like it was kind of interesting and a little bit different way of telling the story.
Nate:
Ambitious for sure.
JM:
Yeah, maybe not entirely satisfying if you're looking for faithfulness to the book, but at the same time, maybe covering the themes more effectively than some of the film adaptations do, tend to highlight the horror and exploitation potential.
And that's a perfect time to talk about the American International Pictures version from 1977, starring Michael York as Edward and Burt Lancaster as Dr. Moreau. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was really fun. Definitely took some liberties. Definitely touching on the exploitation side of things, but I don't know. I liked it a lot. I'm a fan of weird 1970s movies, and I don't know, Burt Lancaster seems like a really cool person and a good actor. I don't know. It's just neat. Michael York is kind of funny, because I know a lot of people think of Michael York in connection with stuff like Austin Powers, but I never really got into that too much. When I think of Michael York, the first thing I think of is this audio presentation of the Bible that I have, where Michael York reads...
Gretchen:
I'm sure that made the scene when he hangs up Moreau pretty interesting.
JM:
Yeah, so he's reading a lot of the early books of the Old Testament, and he has such a soothing, nice, pleasant voice to listen to. And just listening to the Bible stories and Michael York's voice is really nice. Like the furthest thing from a believer, but I don't know. It's cool. I enjoy hearing that. And he makes an interesting Edward. There's some romance stuff going on. There's a lot of over-the-top stuff. Moreau does indeed try to animalize Edward, and Wells kind of did set that up in the book and then went away from it, right? This is like, nah, nah, that's not really what's happening. And Moreau really was nice to him throughout. We can't forget that. Moreau in the book is unfailingly kind and generous toward Edward. Despite the fact that he's annoying as shit. In the movie, yeah, he's an evil bastard. Well, I mean, he's that way in the book too.
Gretchen:
He murders Montgomery as well.
JM:
Yeah. Okay, let him put it this way. In the movie, he's not a gentleman. Yeah. Yeah, but I don't know. I kind of recommend it. Apparently the movie got really bad reviews, which is a surprising, I guess, for the 70s AIP film. But no, it's good. I would definitely suggest that people watch it. It's probably unfairly forgotten. I don't know. Like you might kind of balk at some aspects of it a little bit, but I'm assuming that it's one of the more like probably, I don't know, AIP made some pretty good looking films in the 70s and they seem to.
Nate:
Yeah, it does look good. I'll give it that. I don't really like the way the beastman look. They're all like too clean and well groomed. Like the costumes look like Planet of the Apes creatures, but I think there it works because they're supposed to be like a cultured refined civilization. Yeah. But I don't know. I wasn't really that into this one. I thought the whole thing of Moreau animalizing Edward or whatever we're calling him and this was stupid and I was just like, oh, whatever. But I don't know. It is well shot. There's some good aspects of it. But on the whole, I definitely, definitely preferred the 30s one.
Gretchen:
It's also interesting in this version, in the 70s version, they use like injections rather than actual anything gruesome to create the creatures. It's just like they give them a shot and at least that's what's implied. And then we see that happen when he animalizes him.
Nate:
Yeah. It's kind of an update on the science.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I thought that was an interesting difference. And also the character of Maria. I believe that's the name of the quote unquote Panther woman in that one.
Nate:
Yeah, she's not really pantherized this, but yeah, she's there the whole time.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because I was watching and I was like waiting for some sort of reveal because I thought, well, this is taken. This is like an "Island of Lost Souls" thing. They're going to show that she's like also one of the beasts on the island. And it does not happen until the final frame of the film where it's implied. But there's another still that makes her look more panther like when I've looked up the movie. So I don't know if that was the version I saw that took that out. I'm not sure.
Nate:
Yeah. In the documentary on the nineties one, I think it was I forget who said it, but they said that this was one of the first films that they were disappointed by and wanted their money back because the poster very much implies that she's going to change it with a panther and never does. And the person was so pissed off that I guess they wanted their money back from the theater.
JM:
Wow. Yeah. That actually took my sister to see the nineties version. I didn't go and I still haven't seen that version, but I actually did watch the documentary, which was kind of funny, but I'd still like to watch it someday. But it just seems like an example of, I don't know, Hollywood weirdness, like getting the better of certain things. And yeah, like Stanley is kind of a weird character too. I don't know.
Nate:
Yeah, he definitely is. And that comes out in the documentary. But yeah, the nineties version was awful, but in a really fun way. Like I watched it. I had a great time with it, even though it was incredibly stupid. Yeah, just bad choices all around in every aspect. One of the rare movies that gets everything wrong, but it was fun for me in a way that the seventies one wasn't. So I don't know. I can't say I would recommend this one, but if you're into nonsense, you could do a lot worse.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I didn't see the documentary, but I read up and watched some other like videos and stuff on the production.
JM:
Okay.
Gretchen:
And I only saw like bits and pieces of the actual film, and it's definitely got some strange going on. Is it, is it... Because again, I didn't get, I didn't see the full film are the beasts or like the reveal that they are beasts is introduced when they go into a lab and there's another there's one of them is giving birth, I believe?
Nate:
I don't know if that's the exact reveal, but that's definitely early on and that is definitely what what happens. Yeah.
JM:
The nineties was a weird time.
Nate:
Yeah, it certainly was.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. I didn't watch all of the documentary on the making of this. I watched about half of it. And yeah, it was certainly interesting story and a lot of weird characters involved. I had never heard of the movies "Hardware" and "Dust Devil", which the initial director did, which sound really awesome.
Gretchen:
Richard Stanley, I have seen "Dust Devil". It's pretty interesting.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It's one that also was on Criterion at one point. So I saw it, but I haven't seen "Hardware".
Nate:
Yeah. "Hardware" looks awesome. I definitely want to check out those two. But yeah, I guess he walked out of the production on this one.
Gretchen:
He went off just into the forest, the jungle and then came back in like an act of like undercover. He's in like a few frames of the film because the other actors like got him in the animal costuming.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It's very, very strange behind the scenes experience with that whole film.
JM:
And sometimes that aspect is the most interesting aspect is everything that went on behind the scenes. Right.
Nate:
And the initial concepts that they show of his initial version, I don't think would have made for a much more coherent movie either because that a lot of stuff is like really out there too. And definitely bears little resemblance to the Wells novel, but at least it would have been, well, I don't know what it would have been, but it would have been equally weird, but I think in a different direction.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I think maybe the cast would have had a better time. I don't know.
Nate:
Yeah. The anecdotes involving Val Kilmer are pretty hilarious, I have to say. His performance in the film is also one of the ridiculous aspects of it.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's just, yeah, the tonal shift from like every single character, it feels like everybody's in a different movie. It's just such a, I don't know, one of those 90s train wreck films that only happened out of big budget studio meddling.
JM:
It's so, so, so weird.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know what was up during that time, but there are so many like weird big studio movies that were not good, especially a few decades afterwards, like it's just, oh, I don't know.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I don't know. Part of me kind of wishes there was something like that now, because a lot of times blockbusters feel so safe. I'd love to see a blockbuster come out that was just so bizarre like those.
Nate:
Yeah. I don't know. I really haven't been keeping up with modern films, but it just seems like it's franchise overload at this point where a lot of the genre media are these like $300 million entry number 25 in whatever series.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I would say we need another "Island of Doctor Moreau", but I don't know if I'd want to put another cast through that.
Nate:
Yeah. I don't know. Try "First Men on the Moon" or something first to see how that one goes.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
it would be really neat to do a faithful morrow.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
JM:
But do it in a really filmic way, like make it like emphasize the different medium, the fact that it's not a book, right? So there's a lot of things you could do like you could show beast perspectives. You could show the last 10 months on the island and how like suddenly there's less and less dialogue and Edwards trying to survive and he's failing and everything and he can't even make a raft.
Gretchen:
It would be very interesting to see the gradual metamorphosis back into beast.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I get that the reason why they leave that out most adaptations is because it is a long process and it is kind of this very slow. It would very, it would very much be anticlimactic, but I think it would be interesting to see it attempted.
JM:
Yeah. I would love to see like a Moreau adaptation that doesn't cater to any of the sensibilities like that doesn't. I mean, I like this. I like I went to Los Angeles, I like the 70s version. I think they're cool, but it would be really awesome to see a version of morrow that doesn't cater to any of that and is like a pure not only just an ideas movie, but like movie that makes you feel the discomfort between animal and humanity and puts you in the shoes of the animal sometimes and makes you feel like really challenges your sensibilities. Like make you see that, okay, which is having sadistic, but making you see that puma being tortured, right? Like, I don't know, it's bad, but that's the point, right? So you could set it in 1896 or maybe, I don't know, maybe there's a way to set it in a more contemporary time and make it all right. But I think a historically accurate movie would be cool. I think that would be pretty awesome for sure.
Nate:
Yeah. I'd suggest Netflix do it, but I'm sure they drag it out into like a four season thing that just spirals into weird tangents. So yeah, I don't know. It's kind of weird where film and TV are at nowadays where it seems like the budget and the platforms are available to do faithful long form adaptations of novel. Just the studios don't seem to be interested in doing that for whatever reason. I have no idea why, but the potential is there.
Gretchen:
Don't want to see another "Kindred" incident with "Dr. Moreau".
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Nate:
Especially just gets canceled before it starts to get going.
JM:
But yeah, I mean, it's funny when we talk about H.G. Well's novels, there's always a lot to say. And this was a pretty short book. It's really interesting that, I mean, he would find it very fitting, obviously, because he was a man that wanted to convey ideas. And I think that's also why he was such a major influence on science fiction, besides the fact that he wrote it, obviously. But the mere idea that people read his stuff and realized that, okay, he's not just trying to tell a story. He's trying to get us to think about something, right? He wants us to think about where science is going and what could happen in the future. And we'll be coming back there. We'll be coming back there and seeing his commentaries on a few different things. "Invisible Man" was probably the first one we cover next. So stay tuned for that. That's a really cool book, too, and also kind of a horror story.
Nate:
Yeah, looking forward to it. I haven't read that one. I haven't read this one before this episode. So yeah. Yeah. I like H.G. Wills.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to Invisible Man myself.
JM:
All right. Well, we can get on our boat and head back to the so-called civilized world now and talk about a couple of other stories that we read for this episode coming up next.
Bibliography:
Philmus, Robert (ed.) - "The Island of Doctor Moreau: a variorum text" (1993)
Rieder, John - "Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction" (2008)
Sherborne, Michael - "H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life" (1988)
Shippey, Tom - "Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction" (2016)
Music:
Heiné, Joseph - "Madeira polka" (1874) https://www.loc.gov/item/2023820380
