The Island of Dr. Moreau is a classic, one I've been meaning to read for a long time. Thank you, Orphan Black, for giving me the final push! (Season 3 featured a secret encoded in a copy of this book by one of the scientists responsible for the clone experiments.) I'm not sure I really have much to say about The Island of Dr. Moreau, other than that it was a quick read that I enjoyed as well as felt a little off-put by. For those who are not familiar with this book, it is about a scientist, Dr. Moreau, who removes himself to a remote island after society discovers that he has been experimenting with something called vivisection, which is experimenting surgically on live animal subjects. The story is not told from his perspective, however, and he does not show up right away. Instead, we come to this island and experience its horrors through the eyes of a shipwrecked man named Prendick. Prendick is rescued by Montgomery, who is assisting with the delivery of a fresh crop of animals to his associate Moreau on their island, and through a number of mishaps, Prendick ends up joining the two men on the island as well, although he is not necessarily wanted. Prendick finds out what Moreau is doing on the island, following the anguished cries of animals to an off-limits lab where he conducts his vivisection experiments that he populates the island with. Everything pretty much goes downhill from there, although the real action only takes a few days, and the rest is just Prendick going slightly insane by himself on the island while he waits for a ship to pass by and pick him up.
After his experience, Prendick becomes somewhat of an island unto himself, a veritable social pariah, so paranoid and paralyzed is he by the things he has seen. I suppose anyone would be, after seeing both your living companions killed and the social experiment devolve into madness and violence and you have to survive it somehow. It is a bit hazy (to me; I could be remembering things incorrectly) how long Prendick spent on the island, but this seems very much in keeping with the island mentality, where time passes differently and the outside world has no hold on what comes to pass. Prendick spends much of the book yearning for the outside world, to escape the hellishness he is experiencing on the island, but when he finally re-enters society, he finds himself almost inclined to return to the solitude of his exile. This juxtaposition/reversal is one of many that Wells exploits in Prendick's tale.
H.G. Wells was lauded as a relatively prescient man, however extreme his version of the future might have been. Perhaps it is this prescience that allows his works, while clearly ensconced in the realm of science fiction, can still be so relevant today.
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