Currently Reading: Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
When I first received The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, I was worried that I had run into another accident
like the one I had with The Count of Monte Cristo when I bought the wrong
edition of the novel. I had seen the theatrical adaptation of this story in
high school and assumed the book would be a typical length of about 200 or so
pages. After all, it had to have enough substance to entertain an audience for
over 2 hours. Instead, the book I unwrapped for my birthday was a sliver; the
same thickness of books I read in elementary school. It was so short that I was
concerned that I had mistakenly added the abridged version to my Amazon wish
list.
Turns out, it’s a novella not a novel, and it really is only
54 pages long.
While surprising, I was relieved I had the right version.
And, frankly, Stevenson’s brevity was welcomed after the rather hefty books I’d
been reading.
However, I hate to admit it, but this reading experience was
disappointing.
It wasn’t that the story was poorly written, uninteresting,
or contained insufferable characters like some of the other books I’ve read for
this blog. No, the novella suffered for one simple reason:
The climatic plot twist that the whole story leads up to
wasn’t a surprise.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s shared secret of being the same
person is commonly known and has even become a somewhat common expression to
explain split personality disorders. Hell, there’s even a superhero that
suffers from the same problem. If you know the story of the Hulk, you know the
story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
So when the whole novella is dedicated to a third party’s
investigation of who Mr. Hyde is and his relationship to Dr. Jekyll, it was
really hard to be as curious as the character. The mystery and suspense were
completely gone. I had hoped that I’d at least get an insight into more of
Hyde’s exploits than I did. While the one incident that is described is indeed
repugnant, it didn’t seem like enough to show that Hyde was essentially the
evil inside Dr. Jekyll come to life. Maybe I’ve just watched too much Game of Thrones and my threshold for
horrific if much higher these days…
Either way, I found that a thriller without suspense is
really not much of a thrill to read at all. I would really love to have read
this story before it became popular and famous. It had all the makings for a
really well executed mystery story. It just couldn’t deliver when the ending
was spoiled almost a decade ago.
