CBR Bingo Square: In the Wild
I do love a good retelling, and early sci-fi seems especially ripe for the revisionist takes, given how centered they are on white male protagonists, and how absent the perspectives of women and POC are. So the idea of Moreno-
Garcia’s follow-up to Mexican Gothic being a retelling of The Island of Doctor Moreau was a very appealing one, especially with moving the action to the Yucatan peninsula and engaging with Mexico’s history of indigenous resistance. Carlota, the eponymous daughter, is one of our two POV characters; the other is Montgomery Laughton, a washed-up alcoholic who oversees the hacienda. The two of them also attend to the hacienda’s other residents, the animal-human hybrids created by Doctor Moreau.
The hybrids are imperfect creations, and require regular medical treatment due to tumors and other maladies that plague them as they age. Carlota, too, has a history of infirmity that requires occasional medicating, according to her father. And the reason for the hybrids? An alternative enslaved labor force to the all-too-intractable indigenous people. But Doctor Moreau’s limited success has his patron, Lizalde, impatient for a return on his investment, and maybe that return is Carlota’s marriage to Lizalde’s son, though Laughton can see the problems ahead with this.
The novel is certainly a page-turner, though I didn’t find it quite as effective as Mexican Gothic in producing the same sense of creeping dread; part of this is that Carlota’s naivete and cloistered upbringing are a bit at odds with the dynamism of her predecessor, and the Lizaldes are not quite such subtle villains, either. Laughton is valuable to the narrative as a kind of outsider who can effectively see through some of social manipulation that Carlota doesn’t understand, but handing him POV status perhaps steals too much oxygen from other parts of the story that could heighten the mood and effect of the novel.
But Moreno-Garcia’s decision to not just retell Wells’s story but interweave it with fascinating events in Mexican history is undeniably compelling and effective, and more time in the jungle with the hybrids–and Carlota as she comes to realize the truth of her situation–would have been a delight.