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A review by nigellicus
Dr. Franklin's Island by Ann Halam
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
5.0
Ann Halam is also Gwyneth Jones, which is what prompted me to grab a brace of her books from the Children’s Library on Grand Parade (I have a small child with a library card which gives me license to plunder. Some of these teen books are good, and teenagers are far too silly to appreciate them. Also they are small and weak and easily pushed aside.) Anyway, Jones now has now acquired that coveted title of My New Favourite Writer, see review of Midnight Lamp in the nether regions below.
Dr Franklin’s Island was first and best, a sort of distaff Island of Dr Moreau, though it should be noted I’ve not read The Island of Dr Moreau, so we won’t mention that again, although the title’s evocation of Frankenstein is also worth noting. Three teenagers are stranded on a remote Pacific island after a terrible plane crash: Miranda, Semi and Arnie. Semi, shy and myopic is the narrator. Miranda is more outgoing, taking charge, finding solutions and refusing to give up hope. Arnie, the token boy character, is a prickly sod, but like the others quite vulnerable in his own way. It’s the friendship between the two girls that takes centre stage. At first they seem like polar opposites, but later we come to see they are mirror images.
The island is not as deserted as it first appears, however. Arnie disappears and the girls soon fall into the hands of the terrifying Dr Franklin who, basically, turns Semi into a fish and Miranda into a bird, using genetic engineering. It’s a painful process, but a weirdly liberating one. As transformed creatures with human intelligence the girls lose many of their physical and mental limitations, with the downside being that they are still prisoners of a man who likes to play games to test the psychological state of his subjects. Dr Franklin isn’t a sadistic villain, but a detached genius, a sociopath who cares more for his experiments than for human beings, even when the subjects of his experiments are human beings. To the girls he becomes something akin to a god.
After reading a bunch of thick hefty epics this was… liberating. Short, fast paced, with writing as smooth as ice with sympathetic, human characters all round. It has interesting, quite sophisticated things to say about science, the horrors of its misuse and the sometimes ambiguous consequences of even the most perverse abuses. The title traces a conscious literary line of scientific perversions, but the girls exult in their new forms despite their mistreatment.
I read Dr Franklin’s Island in a single day and it cut right through me. I’m still chewing over some of the issues raised, and still wondering about the lives of the characters and what happened after the final pages.
Dr Franklin’s Island was first and best, a sort of distaff Island of Dr Moreau, though it should be noted I’ve not read The Island of Dr Moreau, so we won’t mention that again, although the title’s evocation of Frankenstein is also worth noting. Three teenagers are stranded on a remote Pacific island after a terrible plane crash: Miranda, Semi and Arnie. Semi, shy and myopic is the narrator. Miranda is more outgoing, taking charge, finding solutions and refusing to give up hope. Arnie, the token boy character, is a prickly sod, but like the others quite vulnerable in his own way. It’s the friendship between the two girls that takes centre stage. At first they seem like polar opposites, but later we come to see they are mirror images.
The island is not as deserted as it first appears, however. Arnie disappears and the girls soon fall into the hands of the terrifying Dr Franklin who, basically, turns Semi into a fish and Miranda into a bird, using genetic engineering. It’s a painful process, but a weirdly liberating one. As transformed creatures with human intelligence the girls lose many of their physical and mental limitations, with the downside being that they are still prisoners of a man who likes to play games to test the psychological state of his subjects. Dr Franklin isn’t a sadistic villain, but a detached genius, a sociopath who cares more for his experiments than for human beings, even when the subjects of his experiments are human beings. To the girls he becomes something akin to a god.
After reading a bunch of thick hefty epics this was… liberating. Short, fast paced, with writing as smooth as ice with sympathetic, human characters all round. It has interesting, quite sophisticated things to say about science, the horrors of its misuse and the sometimes ambiguous consequences of even the most perverse abuses. The title traces a conscious literary line of scientific perversions, but the girls exult in their new forms despite their mistreatment.
I read Dr Franklin’s Island in a single day and it cut right through me. I’m still chewing over some of the issues raised, and still wondering about the lives of the characters and what happened after the final pages.