Book Club 80: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

[Dave Bradley]

Hello again, Book Clubbers!

Our very next read is that uber-classic Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. You must have read that, right? Read it again, it's great.

In SFX 227 novelist Paul McAuley will be leading us in a discussion about The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde by the famous Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson.

Wikipedia entry

Amazon (note: different editions are available)

The deadline for your remarks is 7 August 2012.

Have fun! Cheers, Dave

[hammard]

Or read it for free online here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43


I read this one recently so I will collect my thoughts about it properly soon. Overall though, a great read.

[VictoriaH]

Ooh, never actually read this, though I know the story. Or I guess I think I know the story.... we'll see

Thanks for the link hammard!

[hammard]

I've been trying to get together my thoughts on this tale. I always find it very hard to judge as everyone knows the big twist. In fact my wife was telling me when she studied the book in school they told them it before they started. It has also become such an important part of our cultural landscape, where this century there has already been 5 movies\tv series based upon it and how it's probably impacted on other cultural references points, with both Hulk and Two-Face being obvious examples.

Yet the story still has something, even though we all know what we'll find. The feel of Gothic Victoriana seeps through the pages, where you can see man disappearing in long black cloaks into the mist and hear the hoofbeats echoing on the streets. The focus of the story to be on Utterson rather than Jekyll also allows the mystery to unfold carefully. Actually, knowledge of the main twist even enhances some scenes. When Utterson first confronts Jekyll about Hyde and Dr Jekyll turns pale it is quite a thing to consider him to be afraid of an aspect himself.

The characters are curious ones. The only ones truly developed are the titular Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll is all intellect and no action in some ways, but in others he almost resembles an opium addict, so pale and passive until it is time for the transformation then he is full of fury. Hyde is often described as ape-like and in other animalistic terms, yet he is in some ways more human than Jekyll pleasure seeking, social but yet vengeful. This is of course intentional, at once showing the duality of a person and yet never giving the audience the chance to consider that these two completely opposite men could be part of the same whole.

I many ways it fits in with two of other great English Gothic Science-Fiction\Fantasy novels of the 19th Century, Frankenstein & The Picture of Dorian Gray. These are all tales of ambitious young men who try to set themselves up as God but are bought low by their own ambition. The brilliant twist with this is that Jekyll does not seek the power of creation or immortality but that of virtue. As far as we are aware Jekyll has never done anything that any of us would not be guilty of on occasion, and yet he desires to remove the 'evil twin' from himself, refusing to accept his desires as just a part of his character. In doing so he ends up becoming consumed by them and lead to his final fate.

Overall, it is one of those books that I often will come back to again and again. It may not have the original impact that was intended but it is fascinating nonetheless.


One final tip. The book, I feel, is better if you imagine it read in a Lowland Scottish accent, someone like Bill Patterson. For me lines like "And hitherto it was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that had swelled his indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was his knowledge", just sound so much better with a good Scottish brogue.

[hammard]

Originally Posted by VictoriaH

Thanks for the link hammard!

No problems, I love not having to pay for stuff

[Clown Asylum]

Oooh excellent, one I don't have to spend any money on! I read this years ago, back when my next-door neighbour was a triceratops (Man I could tell you some stories), but could do with a Kindle-based refresh!

[The Ghost of Tom Jones]

It's very difficult for a contemporary audience to comment on the impact Stevenson's work has had. In fact the narrative has been riffed on and parodied so often it's like a warm glove. We know it so well it has no shock value.

But to the Victorian readers make no mistake this book was shocking. Imagine not knowing until the last section what was going on - That the vicious Hyde is in fact Henry Jekyll. Scratch the thin veneer of polite 19th Century humanity and you find violence and horror.

Yeah, it's about "The dual nature of man" but it's much more than that simplistic reading. It's about hypocrisy - the hypocrisy of victorian society that was a Christian driven country that left it's poor to rot and abused it's children and smoked drugs in "dens" and hid that so called sin while pretending to be otherwise.

That veneer didn't have to be scratched that deeply.

Hyde is of course a very subtle negative of Jekyll - Even his house door is connected to the Doctor but is described as being ugly and stained.

A wonderful novel which has become more than a story about London (and , by the way Jekyll's London reads A LOT more like Edinburgh) - It was become myth and common culture.

It's every comedian who drinks a smoking brew and comes up from behind the sofa as a comedy partner. It's even Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde.

But let's never forget it's initial impact as a nightmare ish glimpse of oneself in a twisted mirror.

Essential reading.

[Gaspar]

I've re-read it some years ago to help a friend do a school paper, and found it more dry, more descriptive, in a word, more boring than I remembered it to be, when I read it as a wide-eyed infant.

Probably in my mind the book it's mixed with the numerous film and TV adaptations I've seen (would I enjoy a faithful adaptation of the book? I don't think so.), but this classic of our genre is a mixed affair, between the very interesting plot and the stilted and slow manner in which it's written (very different from "The Treasure Island", his masterpiece), the book gaining momentum and interest only when its most interesting character, Mr. Hyde, comes to the fore.

Even if Frankenstein (a masterpiece) and Dracula are superior works of art, this Stevenson book still has to right to belong to the "holy trinity" of defining books of the genre of Speculative Fiction, and the title itself (and its meaning) belong nowadays to popular culture (how many times me and my friends describe our nightly behavior as being one of "Dr. Jekyll vs. Mr. Hyde”?).