Scifi, but the best sort of Scifi, the sort of Scifi that involves the tweaking of a single parameter which changes the world, like Day of the Triffids and other books by the great John Wyndham.
It is set in the USA, in the early 1960s. Charlie Gordon is a 'retard'. He narrowly escapes being sent to an asylum for retards, getting a job sweeping up in a bakery through the kindness of the bakery owner. The other workers laugh at him and tease him and he is happy, thinking they are his friends.
Following the successful trial of a new neurosurgery technique on Algernon, a mouse who is better at navigating mazes than dumb Charlie, the surgeons operate on Charlie. Bit by bit, at first slowly but soon by leaps and bounds, Charlie's intelligence improves. The misspellings and poor punctuation disappear from his self-penned progress reports. He starts reading, and learning languages. He starts going to lectures at the university where he has had his surgery.
But it comes at a price. He realises that his 'friends' were patronising him, teasing him, humiliating him. Now, however, they aren't friends anymore because now that he is so much cleverer than them, they feel inadequate. As he grows clever and cleverer he starts to alienate the people who are working with him at the university too. He's much brighter than they are!
But he has problems with sex. He has emotional hang-ups from his childhood, when he was a retard, and when his mum was fearful that he would hurt his little sister.
And then (exactly half way through the book) Algernon shows signs that his mental improvement may be only temporary.
It's a great read. There are explicit references to Adam and Eve in it. About one third of the way through the nook, one of the bakery workers is decorating a wedding cake and tells Charlie: "It was evil when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. It was evil when they saw they was naked, and learned about lust and shame. And they was driven out of Paradise and the gates was closed to them. If not for that none of us would have to grow old and be sick and die." (p83) which references the forbidden knowledge theme and the sex theme and foreshadows the closing of the book all in four sentences. Much later, Charlie picks up Paradise Lost: "I could only remember it was about Adam and Eve and the tree of Knowledge, but now I couldn't make sense of it." (p 222)
Less explicitly, the book echoes Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in its tale of a creature created and then rejected by its creator, a creature who is spurned by others and is lonely.
- "It may sound like ingratitude, but that is one of the things that I resent here - the attitude that I am a guinea pig. Nemur's constant references to having made me what I am." (p 111)
- "Everyone kept talking about me as if I were some kind of newly created thing." (p 123)
- "You've boasted time and again that I was nothing before the experiment, and I know why. Because if I was nothing, then you were responsible for creating me, and that makes you my lord and master." (p 190) Not just what the monster might have said to Frankenstein ... but also what Adam might have said to God.
Selected quotes:
- "I was holding on tite to the chair like sometimes when I go to a dentist onley Burt aint no dentist neither but he kept telling me to rilax and that gets me skared because it always means its gonna hert." (p 2) The author uses a clever technique of starting off with Charlie misspelling words and using poor grammar and punctuation (although I'm not convinced in this extract with 'because').
- "Even in the world of make-believe there have to be rules. The parts have to be consistent and belong together." (p 60) True for novels and some mediaeval theologians suggested this was also true for God and that therefore there were limitations on what God could do (eg he couldn't create logical contradictions).
- "How foolish I was even to have thought that professors were intellectual giants. They're people - and afraid the rest of the world will find out." (p 76)
- "The best of them have been smug and patronizing - suing me to make themselves feel superior and secure in their own limitations. Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron." (p 94)
- "You can't tell how I feel or what I feel or why I feel." (p 96)
- "People of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes ... think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence." (p 153) There's always that excuse: I worked hard at school and I got qualifications so I assume that if you didn't get qualifications that meant you didn't work hard and therefore I am entitled to condemn you to a low-paid, low-status life.
- "Although we know the end of the maze holds death ... I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being." (p 169)
- "Ideas explode in my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem." (p 184)
- "There were lots of people sitting in conversation groups, the kind I find impossible to join." (p 186) Know the feeling.
- "Charlie doesn't want me to pierce the upper curtain of the mind. Charlies doesn't want to know what lies beyond. Does he fear seeing God? Or seeing nothing?" (p 217)
- "Why am I always looking at life through a window?" (p 228)
Not just scifi but a well written novel to provoke plenty of thought. And there are bits which are very sixties, too.
June 2023; 238 pages
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