In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [62]
Wells was neither an Eloi nor a Morlock. He must have felt he represented a third way, a rational being who had climbed up the ladder through ability alone, without partaking of the foolishness and impracticality of the social strata above his nor of the brutish crudeness of those below.
But what about Prendick, the narrator of The Island of Doctor Moreau? He’s been pootling idly about the world, for his own diversion we assume, when he’s shipwrecked. The ship is called the Lady Vain, surely a comment on the snooty aristocracy. Prendick himself is a “private gentleman” who doesn’t have to work for a living, and though he—like Wells—has studied with Huxley, he has done so not out of necessity but out of dilettantish boredom—“as a relief from the dullness of [his] comfortable independence.” Prendick, though not quite as helpless as a full-fledged Eloi, is well on the path to becoming one. Thus his hysteria, his lassitude, his moping, his ineffectual attempts at fair play, and his lack of common sense—he can’t figure out how to make a raft because he’s never done “any carpentry or suchlike work” in his life, and when he does manage to patch something together, he’s situated it too far from the sea and it falls apart when he’s dragging it. Although Prendick is not a complete waste of time—if he were, he wouldn’t be able to hold our attention while he tells his story—he’s nonetheless in the same general league as the weak-chinned curate in the later The War of the Worlds, that helpless and drivelling “spoiled child of life.”
His name—Prendick—is suggestive of “thick” coupled with “prig,” this last a thing he is explicitly called. To those versed in legal lore, it could suggest prender, a term for something you are empowered to take without it having been offered. But it more nearly suggests prentice, a word that would have been floating close to the top of Wells’s semiconsciousness, due to his own stint as an apprentice. Now it’s the upper class’s turn at apprenticeship! Time for one of them to undergo a little degradation and learn a thing or two. But what?
2. SIGNS OF THE TIMES
The Island of Doctor Moreau not only comes midway in Wells’s most fertile period of fantastic inventiveness, it also comes during such a period in English literary history. Adventure romance had taken off with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in 1882, and H. Rider Haggard had done him one better with She in 1887. This latter coupled straight adventure—shipwreck, tramps through dangerous swamps and nasty shrubbery, encounters with bloody-minded savages, fun in steep ravines and dim grottos—with a big dollop of weirdness carried over from earlier Gothic traditions, done up this time in a package labelled “Not Supernatural.” The excessive powers of She are ascribed not to a close encounter with a vampire or god but to a dip in a revolving pillar of fire, no more supernatural than lightning. She gets her powers from Nature.
It’s from this blend—the grotesque and the “natural”—that Wells took his cue. An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters—dragons, gorgons, hydras—keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of humankind: science.
The other blend that proved so irresistible to readers was one that was developed much earlier, and to singular advantage, by Jonathan Swift: a plain, forthright style in the service of incredible events. Poe, that master of the uncanny, piles on the adjectives to create “atmosphere”; Wells, on the other hand, follows R. L. Stevenson and anticipates Hemingway in his terse, almost journalistic approach, usually the hallmark of the ultra-realists. The War of the Worlds shows Wells employing this combination to best effect—we think we’re reading