Classics Advisory: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Source: Publisher Website

Happy Samhain, good readers! In honor of my all-time favorite holiday, I have a special Halloween treat for you all. Starting with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I will occasionally review old classics and advise which readers may be interested in them. Classics aren’t for everyone, and some of them are almost unpalatable to modern taste—but there are some that are as appealing today as they were to their original audiences. So without further ado, my review of Stevenson’s classic…

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886; Signet Classics, 2012, 144pp.)

“There sprang up ... in the lawyer’s mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde.”

Two years before Jack the Ripper’s killing spree held sway over London’s East End, Robert Louis Stevenson penned a short, brutish tale about the darkness that lurks within even the kindliest of men. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a frame story, meaning that it’s a story within a story, within a story. It’s told partly through narration, and partly through a series of documents that characters leave for one another to read. It begins with Mr. Utterson, a lawyer and compatriot to the successful chemist Dr. Henry Jekyll, who is investigating his friend’s connection to one Edward Hyde. Hyde is a fiendish man who has made several memorable appearances in the neighborhood. He is “pale and dwarfish,” someone who “[gives] an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation...” He carries himself with “a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness,” and speaks “with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice...” (12). His is a frightening, almost caricatured portrait of the very epitome of ill will. He literally tramples people underfoot should they cross his path on the street, and at one point, beats a man to death in a senseless fit of rage. Utterson’s cause for concern stems from the sudden change Jekyll has made to his will, instructing that in the event of his “sudden disappearance,” his entire estate is to be put at the disposal of Mr. Hyde. As Utterson continues his investigation, he soon realizes that there’s an even stranger connection between the two men that he had ever dreamed possible...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will of course know exactly what that connection is: Jekyll is Hyde (and vice versa)! Jekyll’s very transformation from mild-mannered doctor to fiendish “juggernaut” is a reminder that even the most pleasant and presentable among us could be hiding a foul interior. Stevenson’s tale is a marvelous little work, excellent for Halloween readings and other spooky occasions. While it has plenty of creep factor to it, it’s still pretty tame when compared to Stephen King’s stuff. The downside for Dr. J and Mr. H is that as a novella, it’s really too short to do anything other than explore its premise, leaving its characters as little more than bare sketches on the page.

Interesting Relic from the Cold War Era

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959; Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005, 352pp.)

If you grew up during the Cold War Era, chances are you remember practicing the “duck and cover” method - crawling under your desk at school and covering your head - to protect yourself from a nuclear blast. Although that may sound ridiculous to us enlightened twenty-first century folk, this era of human history was a time of very real fear - fear of being overrun by Communism and of sudden annihilation by nuclear war. In fact, it was this fear that drove many novelists to document their anxieties through post-apocalyptic scenarios. Alas, Babylon is one of the many modern classics to emerge from this period.

The story is this: Mark Bragg, older brother to the novel’s main protagonist, Randy, is with SAC intelligence in the US military. With tensions rising between the US and Russia, Randy has agreed to take in his brother’s wife and kids, who live on a military base in Omaha, Nebraska, should things escalate to a full-scale nuclear war. The private code phrase agreed upon is “Alas, Babylon,” taken from a verse from the Bible’s Book of Revelations about the destruction of an ancient city marked by its population’s iniquitous behavior. When Randy receives a telegram ending with those two words, he knows the end is near. Fortunately for him, however, he lives in Fort Repose, a small, out-of-the-way town in Florida. While the Russians are certain to bomb major cities and military targets, little towns like his lose their electricity, but manage to avoid major damage to their infrastructures. Once all military targets and major cities have been reduced to radioactive dust, it becomes a story of a town’s fight for survival as society as we know it creeps back toward the middle ages. Highwaymen prey on travelers, and stealing community livestock becomes an offense punishable by death. Paper money no longer has value - instead, people trade for goods like coffee, soap, whiskey, etc. While the town is not troubled by radioactive fallout, looters foolish enough to wander into contaminated “hot” zones bring about their own demise when they steal radioactive jewelry and valuables from abandoned stores and stash them in their homes.

In other words, Frank maps out his premise well, and builds an interesting story about life in a small town after the apocalypse. So for those interested in great plots and big ideas, this relic from the Cold War Era is worth checking out - although if you’re not a member of the Baby Boomer generation, I would definitely suggest talking to someone who lived during this era to fully appreciate Frank’s work.

A Cautionary, Contemplative Portrait of Mankind Faced With Its Own Mortality

On the Beach by Nevil Shute (1957; Vintage, 2010, 320pp.)

What would you do if you only had six months to live? Unfortunately, this is a choice that some people face on an everyday basis, due to cancer or some other illness. In the case of Shute’s novel, the characters find themselves faced with a rather messy, prolonged death by radiation sickness. One of the several post-apocalyptic classics to emerge form the Cold War Era, this is a very humane, compassionate look at a group of people living out their final days in a major Australian city after a series of nuclear wars wipe out all life in the Northern hemisphere.

The characters’ reactions to their impending doom make it a very British book, reminiscent of the old World War II slogan, “Keep calm and carry on.” While every now and then someone reacts with intense despair, most of the citizens of this Australian town come to accept their fate and instead see it as a blessing that they are able to die together with their families. One character even reasons that it’s better to take your own life while in your prime—albeit in unfortunate circumstances - rather than to linger into old age in a nursing home.

There are some moments of mild, if sometimes shocking humor. An instance of this humor is Shute’s narration of Australia’s last Grand Prix race, writing of how people come out to the races to compete in their Bentleys, Ferraris, Jaguars, Maseratis, and Thunderbirds (including a car I’ve never heard of, called a “Gipsy Lotus”), only for half of the contestants to die mangled in wrecks. “He got it the way he wanted it to be,” the wife of one crash victim serenely comments. “None of this being sick and all the rest of it” (217).

The ultimate conclusion of the novel is that if humanity is capable of such atrocity, then perhaps the race isn’t worthy of the planet it so eagerly destroys. A cautionary, contemplative portrait of mankind faced with its own mortality. Highly recommended.

Vonnegut's Vision of the Future

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952; Dial Press, 1999, 352pp.)

Welcome to Ilium, New York, a dystopia where machines have overtaken the usefulness of the common worker. Vonnegut follows the standard formula in his offering to the dystopian genre: the protagonist, trapped in a severely flawed society, tries to overcome his plight and ends up, more often than not, as just another casualty of the system. In this case, the hero is Dr. Paul Proteus, an engineer and one of the big wigs at Ilium Works. Education and money divide the city into the haves and the have nots, with the highest paying jobs going to those who have earned at least a master’s degree (those with less than a bachelor’s are assigned manual labor). Proteus feels stifled by the boring life of social functions and parties, and often goes slumming in the poorer parts of the city. Here, he is witness to the life of the “common people,” the undereducated second-class citizens who have lost their jobs to machines, and soon comes to empathize more with them than with his own class. When he is contacted by the infamous Ghost Shirt Society, an underground organization that seeks to overthrow the machines, he is given a chance to change the face of society itself. It’s not exactly an original idea, but it is a classic one in science fiction: what happens when man’s role in society is replaced by the very inventions he created to make his life easier? Player Piano is a timeless book about modern man’s fear of technology’s possibilities, and the universal worry that society as we know it will change beyond our recognition. This is a very funny, sarcastic vision of the future that any lover of classic science fiction is guaranteed to love.

Click on cover for image source.

By Turns Both Enlightening and Agonizing

Independent People by Halldór Laxness (1934; Vintage, 1997, 482 pp.)

This 1955 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is unlike any book you will ever read. It is a multigenerational tale focusing on the bleak, oppressive living conditions of rural Iceland in the early twentieth century, in particular on one Bjartur of Summerhouses, a sheep farmer who is fiercely independent. Although the book is subtitled “an epic,” perhaps it should instead be titled “a depressing, satirical epic that actually makes you laugh once in a while.” This is by no means an easy read. Weighing in at almost 500 pages, this dry, plodding tome spends whole chapters wading through minute details on local politics and the economy with an attentive (and infuriating) sort of calm. The story itself is almost painful to read at times, oscillating between delightful humor and black despair. It relates, for example, Bjartur’s delight in rolling big rocks from cliff-tops and watching them fall (who doesn’t like doing that?), while later describing the slow starvation and eventual death of his flock one spring. Our hero is infuriating, bullheaded, and stubborn, but reassuringly human at his core, allowing the reader to cheer him on, once in a while, as he blunders his way through life. Independent People is an admirable, poetic novel, by turns both masterful and agonizing on the nerves. It’s the kind of book that one will appreciate having read at least once, but not plan to revisit anytime soon.