Review: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

This gothic novel comes from one of the oldest lineages in science fiction. We have the obvious connection to H.G. Wells’s novel featuring the island of the eponymous doctor but his life-altering experiments owe no little debt to Doctor Frankenstein. The mad scientist closeted in his castle or his basement or his island or…in the case of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel, the colonial estate on the Yucatan peninsula.

The haunting nature of gothic buildings as enclosing the decaying European land-owners with their own ghosts, secrets and madnesses joins multiple lineages from the aforementioned Frankenstein to Jane Austen’s satire on the genre Northanger Abbey. Moreno-Garcia transposed the genre to Mexico with a literal English country house rebuilt to hide a terrible secret in Mexican Gothic. If that novel leant on the horror elements of the Gothic, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau taps into the science fictional (or at least mad scientist) roots and those roots are deep ones.

Doctor Moreau is less of a vivisectionist in this remaigning and more of an early experimenter into (an adimitably unfeasible) for of genetic engineering. The creation of human-like beings from animals remains his objective. However, to maintain his funding he has sworn to create pliable workers for a wealthy Mexican landowner.

It is the 1870’s and Mexican aristocracy is encroaching on what remains of indigenous land in the Yucatán Peninsula. To add to the problems, the British Empire also has designs on the region, with eyes on expanding its influence from British Honduras outwards.

The Frenchman Moreau mantains an estate in the disguise of a sanitorium where he can continue his experiments, funded by a promise to create pliable plantations workers for a wealthy landowner. With him on the estate is his daughter Carlota and the morose Englishman Montgomery Laughton who acts as his estate manager.

Nothing is going to end well here as landowner ambitions, British ambitions and indigenous rebels are fighting for control over the land and Moreau struggles to perfect his unnatural experiments.

The focus though is on Carlota and while the central idea of Well’s novel is horrific, here it is a given. The reader and Carlota already know what Moreau is up to. The experiments themselves are not the hidden mystery at the heart of the estate.

This is a slow burn of a novel. Carlota plays Miranda to Moreau’s Prospero and both he undoing and her awakening come in the form of attactive young men from outside. The tragedy and revelations that come in the heels of that are not big suprises but they add to the tensions which finally erupt in the latter parts of the novel.

This is a work that puts all its effort into atmosphere and tension. The estate is Carlota’s world and her love for it only hightens the tension of what lays beyond it, whether it is the high-society of Mexico City or the almost legendary Mayan rebels hiding in the surrounding jungle.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I’ll come back to how I see it as a Hugo finalist when I look at all of them together but so far I see it as a strong entry and a worthy contender.