God had entrusted her father with the labor of perfecting creation and delivering us all from sin, and thus the doctor had created the hybrids. Dr. Moreau was therefore a prophet, a holy man.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Hugo-nominated book takes a new look at H.G. Wells’s classic. The island setting has now been moved to a real location (the Yucatán Peninsula) in the middle of a real conflict in the late 1800’s between the native Maya population and, well, everyone else. The novel also adds a new element: the existence of Dr. Moreau’s daughter, who dearly loves both her scientist father and the monsters he’s created.
Moreau, afflicted with a strange creative streak, had made furry hybrids with hunched shoulders and short forearms, but also apelike things whose knuckles could brush the ground when they walked, their spines curved. He’d created a squat hybrid that had the round, startled eyes and the long tongue of the kinkajou, another painted with the telltale dots and stripes of the paca, and yet a third with the small ears and distinctive, bony, transverse bands of the armadillo.
Instead of seeing everything from the eyes of a shipwrecked biology student, the chapters are narrated by Dr. Moreau’s young daughter Carlota, and his mayordomo Montgomery Laughton. We’re actually first introduced to Montgomery as he travels with Moreau’s boss Hernando Lizalde, in the hopes that he can get a job with Moreau and pay off some of his crushing debt. Lizalde’s been pretty vague about Moreau and his sanatorium at Yaxaktun, so it’s a huge shock when he’s introduced to the catlike companions of his daughter, and all of the other hybrids Moreau’s created in his quest to “improve” life. The whole concept is a little nightmarish, and Montgomery isn’t sure he can stick around without going crazy.
Then six years have passed almost before you know it, and his life is perfectly fine.
I can’t emphasize enough just how…soothing life in Yaxaktun can be. Carlota loves her life there, and Montgomery, well he’s fleeing an abusive childhood, a failed marriage, and a betrayal that’s led to years of alcoholism and self-destructive behavior, so it’s not accurate to say he’s “happy”. But at the very least he’s found a lot to be content with in Dr. Moreau’s jungle rancho. The author would be an excellent PR person for the Yucatán Peninsula; every section is full of descriptions of the lush, vibrant surroundings, occasionally taking a moment to introduce the reader to words they might not be familiar with, but probably should be. (For example, I think I knew about the concept of “cenotes”, but I didn’t know they had an actual name, and now I badly want to see one in real life.)
The hybrids that Dr. Moreau has created are strangely enough part of what makes life pleasant for Carlota and Montgomery. H.G. Wells’s original story showed the hybrids as nameless monsters who were brutal and unsettling for normal humans to look at. Here, they all have names, and personalities, and if they’re not always polite and friendly then at the very worst they like to complain and indulge in some well-meaning teasing. (Especially Carlota’s companion Lupe. She’s entertainingly sassy pretty much all the time.) Carlota and Montgomery give the hybrids their daily medicine, fearlessly tend to the ailments that keep cropping up in the hybrids despite all of the doctor’s attempts to make them “perfect”, and even occasionally join them at their nights of bonfires and drinking.
All of this contentment and peace is broken by the arrival of two young men, one of whom is the son of Hernando Lizalde, and who falls rather dangerously in love with Carlota almost on sight.
This new disruption reveals how much at Yaxaktun has been hidden or lied about, and how much everyone’s desires are at odds with everyone else’s. Hernando Lizalde wants Moreau to finish creating the cheap workforce he needs to replace the native population. Moreau wants to keep experimenting until he’s finally accomplished a goal that not even he seems to be all that clear on. Eduardo wants a beautiful and well-behaved wife, Montgomery wants…Carlota. (Shut up, Montgomery, that was clear from the moment you first saw her.) And Carlota wants to be a dutiful daughter, and to give the hybrids health and freedom, and to maybe find true love, and you know all of this is going to go very badly but you don’t realize just how bad until everything hits the fan.
But she couldn’t rest because the paradox remained in her mind: that she must be a child to her father and also a grown woman. He wouldn’t let her grow, and yet he expected her to behave like a sophisticated, mature person.
There are echos of Carlota’s situation in everything the native people are going through, and more echoes in the plight of the hybrids. None of them are expected to choose or even think for themselves, they’re expected to obey. The system of crushing debt and brutality means the wealthy keep the poor working until they drop, and anyone who tries to make a run for it to join the rebels are hunted down like the jaguars that Montgomery hunts for Moreau. Carlota is expected to do whatever she can to keep Lizalde funding Moreau’s experiments; her primary value is something to be used as a bargaining chip or a bribe. (You can see that attitude in the threats of estupro, the crime of seducing a minor who’s over the age of consent. Basically it’s less a crime of rape and more one of damaging valuable property.) And the hybrids are at best a source of cheap labor, and at worse they’re just rough drafts, living in pain until they can be perfected. Even Montgomery is just slightly more that a slave, with no options other than to keep paying his debt to Lizalde forever, or drink himself to death.
We are all commodities at Yaxaktun. Commodities to be sold and traded and bartered.
The alternating chapters lets the reader see everything either through Carlota’s slowly-disappearing innocence or Montgomery’s hardened cynicism. Getting to see the same scene twice, sometimes the same argument, lets the reader see exactly how one person is affected by careless words. The dialog is lively. Sometimes it’s longtime friends teasing each other (sassy Lupe especially, her scenes are always a delight), or Montgomery and Carlota testing each other’s boundaries. Other times it’s full-on rage: Eduardo’s friend Isidro being utterly disgusted at the “godless” place, Hernando Lizalde in a fury about his wasted investment in Moreau’s experiments, or Moreau himself delivering a fiery sermon that’s one more variation on “If you’re suffering then God’s using it to improve you, and also you deserve it.”
There are a lot of hard questions in this book, but also a lot to enjoy. I loved all of the details of life in a slowly crumbling rancho, surrounded by otherworldly creatures and long-kept secrets. You know everything’s going to lead to bloodshed eventually, but takes a direction that was entertainingly shocking. I think my favorite element was Carlota herself. This is not a typical story where true love just conveniently happens to occur with the person who’s nicest, and in many, many ways Carlota is a lot more than a damsel in distress.