(Warning: This review has spoilers. But, c'mon, you've had 139 years to read "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," so if you haven't finished it yet, that's on you.)
I was surprised by how short "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is. This famous 1886 novella, by Robert Louis Stevenson, was only 149 screen-pages on my phone (by comparison, "Moby Dick" was 1,299). I read it in less than a day.
It seemed like it was over too soon, especially considering the fame of the story. We've all heard countless references to "Jekyll and Hyde," right? We know, even if you haven't read the novella, that the names are shorthand for two opposite personalities — one good, one evil.
Stevenson presents the story as a mystery. A Mr. Edward Hyde has been seen doing terrible things around town, even murder, but no one realizes that he is actually the well-respected Dr. Henry Jekyll.
This wasn't a mystery to me, or probably most readers, I'm sure. But that did not prevent it from being a compelling story. The plot moves sharply along and quickly becomes a page-turner. Stevenson's writing, though somewhat antiquated in language, is detailed and evocative. Consider this passage, when Mr. Hyde confronts a elderly man on a darkened street:
The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway.
Yikes.
In the final chapter of the book, Dr. Jekyll reveals in a lengthy letter (much like a monologue) that he created Mr. Hyde while experiementing with drugs to separate his "evil" side from the rest of him.
"Man is not truly one, but truly two," says Dr. Jekyll, showing his philosophical side.
Dr. Jekyll believed that separating out the evil side would allow his "upright" side to thrive.
If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
Not surprisingly, things don't go as planned. The unleashed evil Mr. Hyde thrives and threatens to completely take over Dr. Jekyll.
My virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion ... I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.
While this last chapter is essential for telling the story, it is also too one-dimensional, too long and too repetitive. The chapter consumes fully the last quarter of the book and it is entirely Dr. Jekyll's monologue. Though it has merits, this section sucks much of the energy from a book filled with a stirring plot and character interplay.
That said, there's no doubt that "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" makes you think I was tempted at first to view this simply as a story about schizophrenia, but I soon realized it goes deeper. Stevenson raises important questions about the human mind and how we manage our views of right and wrong.
"All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil," says Dr. Jekyll, "and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."
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