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3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
This is significantly more terrifying to read as it is to watch.
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
“These seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women, men and women forever, perfectly reasonable creatures full of human desires and tender solicitude emancipated from instinct and are slaves of no fantastic law, being altogether distinct from the beast folk. Yet I shrink from them.”
Once again I wasn’t a huge lover of a book by HG Wells. His writing just doesn’t quite work for me. ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ follows Edward Prendick who is shipwrecked on a remote tropical island used by a Victor Frankenstein-esque doctor who transforms animals into imitations of humans. It was quite similar to Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘The heart of a dog’ in this sense yet Bulgakov did a much better job in exploring this. Wells’ sci-fi has undertones of racism and explicit themes of animal cruelty throughout, which Prendick is somewhat a figure exposing this but also his sympathy is very limited and often leads to violence. There are also traits of Wells’ writing which feature here as I have observed in others of his work, principally the fallback of saying “these creatures were indescribable to my human mind” to paraphrase and then proceeds to not convey to the reader what he is talking about, almost just because its a science fiction Wells uses that as a fallback for lazy writing. I can commend unlike others in this case that the characters were actually named, there were few of them so I had a good understanding of them and development was okay, good for Wells’ standard at least.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty
adventurous
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
So sad and disturbing. An obvious choice for deep reading and book clubs, with a wide range of topics to explore. I found it interesting to consider not only the actions and attitudes of the characters, but of the narrative and perhaps even the author. The prose didn’t do anything for me but I’m glad I read it.
Poor sloth…
Poor sloth…
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
challenging
dark
tense