Silvia Moreno-Garcia examines gender and class in her romantic reimagining of a sci-fi classic
The bestselling author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau spoke with Shelagh Rogers about her latest novel
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a Canadian novelist and critic who was born and raised in Mexico. She is the author of Signal to Noise, which won the 2016 Copper Cylinder Award, Gods of Jade and Shadow, The Beautiful Ones and Mexican Gothic. Her book Velvet Was The Night was on the Canada Reads 2022 longlist and was selected by former U.S. president Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of 2022.
Moreno-Garcia's newest novel, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, takes its inspiration from the novella by H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is both a reimagining and a reboot of his classic science fiction tale — set in the sweltering jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula.
Moreno-Garcia spoke with Shelagh Rogers about writing The Daughter of Doctor Moreau.
A striking cover
"[The book cover] is very important. I've done some art direction before, so I like to collaborate in the cover process. It can be a difficult process.
"One thing that we've discovered is that a lot of artists just don't know how to draw nonwhite faces. This seems like a very small and silly thing, but it's actually very big when you can't get the cover to look right. For a long time, faces of people of colour just did not appear on book covers.
"That also reflects how the industry did not really reflect a lot of segments of the population."
A reimagined setting
"I normally need something to ground me to a setting. When I was thinking about The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, I couldn't begin work on it — although I had several ideas about some stuff that I wanted to tackle — because the setting was fuzzy. I didn't live on that kind of island, so I just couldn't imagine the people, the places, the things that would be happening there.
I normally need something to ground me to a setting.
"I thought about situating it in Mexico because I was watching an old black and white movie called The Black Cat that made me think about old movies like Island of Lost Souls — the first adaptation of The Island of Doctor Moreau. I thought Island of Lost Souls could have been shot in Mexico and it would have worked fine. When I made that connection, I immediately knew where it could be set."
Class dynamics
"Class is this ever-present situation that affects the world. It's not the same if you're at the bottom rung of a society, like in 19th century Mexico and the Yucatan, as if you're at the top of the heap. There's all these gradients of class that come in everywhere in the world, but especially in colonized states, they become very interesting because things like colour suddenly acquire a great significance.
Class is this ever-present situation that affects the world.
"There are very small signifiers that can place you at the bottom or the top of a certain social pyramid. And in terms of womanhood, there's also a pyramid of where you are and the things you can do and that you can't do in 19th century Mexico. As you can imagine, if you're a woman, if you're a young woman, there are a lot of things that you just can't do."
The 'model daughter'
"We meet Carlotta, the main character, when she's just a teenager. She's 14, and then we make a time leap six years later. But when we meet Carlotta, she is trying to be the model daughter, and she's trying to embody all of the virtues that would be considered proper in that time period of a young woman.
She's just trying to be the perfect daughter. And as the story advances, as we see that she's having a little bit of trouble maintaining that female ideal.
"She's meek and quiet and beautiful. She reflects all of the womanly virtues, such as doing embroidery, trying to do a little bit of music, reading the correct kinds of books.
"She's trying to be the perfect daughter. And as the story advances, as we see that she's having a little bit of trouble maintaining that female ideal."
A new world
"[Carlotta and Doctor. Moreau] live an isolated life. It's an island of solitude in the middle of a jungle. So Carlotta has not been exposed to society, really. She's experienced society from afar, by reading about it in newspapers and books, by learning about it from her father. But she has not interacted with very many people outside of this sort of enclosure where she where she lives.
She's experienced society from afar, by reading about it in newspapers and books, by learning about it from her father.
"Then Eduardo, the wealthy young son of the landowner funding Doctor. Moreau's experiments, arrives this stranger, brings forth change as he brings chaos into into this very neatly contained world."
Silvia Moreno-Garcia's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
