Book Review: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Horror: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
In the 1896 book The Island of Doctor Moreau, a shipwrecked man with a scientific education lands on an island populated by strange inhabitants which are part-human and part-animal. These hybrids are the creations of Doctor Moreau, a “vivisectionist” from London whose experiments there shocked English society and drove him into a self-imposed exile. One of the earlier science fiction novels (with likely some indebtedness to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), H.G. Wells explored questions of what truly differentiates humans from animals.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia has taken some of the characters and themes of Wells’ book and truly made them her own in her novel, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. Her Doctor Moreau is French, a Parisian doctor disgraced and shunned for his experiments with vivisection. He flees to the Yucatan Peninsula, to a small compound near the coast, where his experiments can continue without interference or opprobrium. He lives there with his daughter, Carlota, an exquisitely beautiful and graceful young woman, highly intelligent and eager to learn the secrets of her brilliant father. Montgomery Laughton serves as the compound’s overseer, procuring supplies and animals for the doctor and the other residents. He has dealt with his life’s disappointments by drowning his sorrows with alcohol. Most of those other residents are hybrids, animals infused with human characteristics so that they are neither fully human nor fully animal.
Moreno-Garcia specializes in a kind of horror story that reveals piece after piece after piece of the mystery, leaving room for a startling end that is unexpected–and simultaneously logical and in hindsight perhaps inevitable. None of her characters are entirely good or evil. They are humans (or nearly so) with the weaknesses of humans: alcoholism and lust, arrogance and judgmentalism, greed and a thirst for power. Moreau is ostensibly doing his research to create workers for the fields who are strong enough to do the work, adapted to the heat, and pliant enough to obey. The regional Mayan population has shown an unfortunate tendency to prefer freedom to enslavement, so the local landlords are seeking alternatives. Moreau’s willingness to accept financial backing under those conditions demonstrates a callousness toward life–if his cruel experimentation had not sufficiently demonstrated it already.
The story, though, is mostly about Carlota. A young woman coming of age, the only child of a brilliant but amoral father, a beauty whose value to her father is not from the brilliance of her intellect but rather from the financial alliance a favorable marriage would provide. Carlota, though, has her own agenda, one that may run parallel to her father’s at times but one that is also very much her own. When those two different agendas diverge, the results are explosive.
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau may take some cues from H.G. Wells but the work is very much in keeping with Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s other novels. Eerie, with a uniquely Mexican perspective, using the setting to its full advantage, giving little away before it is needed. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Book Review: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia