The Island Of Doctor Moreau

There must be few educated people alive today who are unaware of the theory of evolution of species, even if they do not know the technical details or if they reject it out right. It is difficult in such a society to imagine the startlement, even shock, many people experienced when Darwin's ideas became widespread for the first time. This book is H.G. Wells' reaction to those ideas. Wells studied biology under Huxley, a great Darwin apologist, and makes his protagonist another such student - one who is forced by shipwreck into life on a Pacific island populated by the notorious Dr. Moreau, Dr. Moreau's drunkard of an assistant and a group of very peculiar folk indeed.
This short book is over in a flash, but bears a good deal of thought in the aftermath - not merely a fast paced adventure, it is religious allegory, social comment and scientific speculation. Indeed, Margaret Atwood, in her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition gives us 10 different ways of looking at the book. One of them is as a descendant of Robinson Crusoe and the endings of both bare a certain similarity and are very fitting.
The remarkable descriptive powers shown in the best segments of Wells' later work, The War of the Worlds, are not seen here but the tendency towards over-long sentences is also absent and this work is perhaps the more thought provoking.