In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [67]
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
In The Ancient Mariner–like pattern at the end of The Island of Doctor Moreau, the “albatross” is still alive. It has suffered no harm at the hands of Prendick. But he lives in the shadow of a curse anyway. His curse is that he can’t love or bless anything living—not bird, not beast, and most certainly not man. He has another curse too: the Ancient Mariner is doomed to tell his tale, and those who are chosen to hear it are convinced by it. But Prendick chooses not to tell because, when he tries, no one will believe him.
10. FEAR AND TREMBLING
What then is the lesson learned by the unfortunate Prendick? It can perhaps best be understood in reference to The Ancient Mariner. The god of Moreau’s island can scarcely be described as a dear God who makes and loves all creatures. If Moreau is seen to stand for a version of God the Creator who “makes” living things, he has done, in Prendick’s final view, a very bad job. Similarly, if God can be considered as a sort of Moreau, and if the equation “Moreau is to his animals as God is to man” may stand, then God himself is accused of cruelty and indifference—making man for fun and to satisfy his own curiosity and pride, laying laws on him he cannot understand or obey, then abandoning him to a life of torment.
Prendick cannot love the distorted and violent furry folk on the island, and it’s just as hard for him to love the human beings he encounters on his return to “civilization.” Like Swift’s Gulliver, he can barely stand the sight of his fellow men. He lives in a state of queasy fear, inspired by his continued experience of dissolving boundaries: as the beasts on the island have at times appeared human, the human beings he encounters in England appear bestial. He displays his modernity by going to a “mental specialist,” but this provides only a partial remedy. He feels himself to be “an animal tormented … sent to wander alone.”
Prendick forsakes his earlier dabblings in biology and turns instead to chemistry and astronomy. He finds “hope”—“a sense of infinite peace and protection”—in “the glittering hosts of heaven.” As if to squash even this faint hope, Wells almost immediately wrote The War of the Worlds, in which not peace and protection, but malice and destruction, come down from the heavens in the form of the monstrous but superior Martians.
The War of the Worlds can be read as a further gloss on Darwin. Is this where evolution will lead—to the abandonment of the body, to giant, sexless, blood-sucking heads with huge brains and tentaclelike fingers? But it can also be read as a thoroughly chilling coda to The Island of Doctor Moreau.
NOTES
1. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, p. 87.
2. The War of the Worlds, p. 117.
3. Silverberg, Voyagers in Time, p. x.
4. The “brass brassiere” is from an oral history of science fiction prepared by Richard Wolinsky for Berkeley’s KPFA-FM.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go is the sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his chilling rendition of a bootlickingly devoted but morally blank English butler, The Remains of the Day. It’s a thoughtful, crafty, and finally very disquieting look at the effects of dehumanization on any group that’s subject to it. In Ishiguro’s subtle hands, these effects are far from obvious. There’s no Them-Bad, Us-Good preaching; rather there’s the feeling that as the expectations of such a group are diminished, so is its ability to think outside the box it has been shut up in. The reader reaches the end of the book wondering exactly where the walls of his or her own invisible box begin and end.
Ishiguro likes to experiment with literary hybrids, and to hijack popular forms for his own ends, and to set his novels against tenebrous historical backdrops; thus, When We Were Orphans mixes the Boy’s Own Adventure with the 1930s detective story while taking a whole new slice out of the Second