“Wicked thoughts can lead to wicked deeds, and wicked deeds can, in turn, poison the mind further.”
Robert Masello’s THE JEKYLL REVELATION (2016) is a fascinating homage to author Robert Louis Stevenson as well as to one of the writer’s most famous tales: THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL & MR HYDE (1886). In Acknowledgements to THE JEKYLL REVELATION, Masello, who has been “an award-winning journalist, a television writer, and the bestselling author of many novels and nonfiction books,” writes, “I had struggled for some time with the idea of writing a book about Robert Louis Stevenson.” Masello’s novel brilliantly brings to life the famous writer’s nearly life-long pursuit for relief to his physical ills, seeking a cure to a nagging and worsening bronchial condition which aided in bringing about his death at age forty-four.
Traveling with his family from Britain throughout the United States, southern France, Canada, and finally Samoa, THE JEKYLL REVELATION begins with Stevenson venturing to the Hotel Belvédére in Switzerland during a period of extremely poor health, seeking treatment, like so many others, from “the most renowned pulmonologist of his day, Dr. Carl Rüedi. The treatment Stevenson receives in Switzerland is of the sort of illogical fantasy as one can find in old, low budget Monogram B-type movies of the 1940s with Bela Lugosi playing a man scientist, but since Stevenson’s treatment is pivotal to the novel’s plot, readers will need to willingly suspend their disbelief for the pieces of THE JEKYLL REVELATION to properly fall in place.
Along with Stevenson’s life (fictionalized, but with much of it based on Masello’s research), Masello also plays tribute to the author’s various successful works such as TREASURE ISLAND (1883) and KIDNAPPED (1886), both long envisioned as novels by boys but not necessarily so, and most importantly to the immense success of THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL & MR HYDE, including an 1887 stage production which captured the imagination of London theater goers a year later starring Richard Mansfield (1857-1907) in what was described as an incredible performance as the duo personality which severely frightened audiences at the time.
It is the London stage play of Stevenson’s work which also triggers multiple events in THE JEKYLL REVELATION. As Masello explains in his “Author’s Note” to the book, the novel “came about, in fact, because of something I happened to read in a book about Victorian London. It was while the stage play of THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL & MR HYDE was playing in the West End that Jack the Ripper first struck, and official suspicion briefly fell on Robert Louis Stevenson and on the actor who played the dual title role. That started the wheels turning, and led, in the fullness of time, to this very book.” Thus, readers not only get a healthy dose of Robert Louis Stevenson in THE JEKYLL REVELATION, but Jack the Ripper’s murder spree, as well. There are also cameo appearances by Bram Stoker, manager of the Lyceum Theater before he became famous as the author of DRACULA (1897), confessing to Stevenson he’d like to write a “bogey tale” of his own. Poet, editor, and Stevenson friend W. E. Henley, “the model for the one-legged pirate Long John Silver in TREASURE ISLAND,” also makes several appearances. References are also made to another famous author and celebrity of the time, Oscar Wilde.
Masello’s storytelling is nearly flawless and almost frustratingly suspenseful. Using a time-honored narrative stratagem, the author utilizes short, fast-moving chapters, vacillating back and forth between Stevenson in 1881 to 1894 and the present-day set in Topanga Canyon, California. The California scenes focus upon Rafael Salzar, “a field officer with the Environmental Science Service, a perpetually underfunded division of the Bureau of Land Management” whose research in the wild becomes more and more inexplicable with a remarkable discovery owing to a long drought and some very dangerous locals willing to illegally serve up their own modern day horrors. The Stevenson episodes are written as though they are a diary of the writer whereas the Topanga Canyon portions are narrated by a third person narrator. With seemingly little to connect them, Masello slowly and masterfully brings the two stories together in a mesmerizing and at times formidable fashion.
Writers who utilize real-life personalities for their fiction walk a tightrope. If they sacrifice too much authenticity at the expense of their story, they run the risk of creating so false of an image of the historic personage as to endanger the reader’s enjoyment or acceptance of their tale. Masello manages not to run afoul of this trait during at least the first half of the novel, but does press the envelope at times, especially in the latter half of the novel, taking liberties with Stevenson’s character. There is one particular span of time in the novel in which readers are likely to start to cringe in regards to the characterization of Stevenson until Masello makes events and motives clearer.
Seeing the page count suddenly rapidly dwindle, readers are bound to wonder how Masello is going to satisfactorily bring the two branches of his story and THE JEKYLL REVELATION to its conclusion. With a clever, not altogether unexpected sleight of hand due to some foreshadowing, the author does so. Readers are left with a more than tantalizing and pleasing reading experience and very likely a desire to read more by Masello as well as more of Stevenson’s work, while regretting what might have been had the author lived a longer and less pain-wracked life.
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Top reviews from other countries
heather g.
Excellent mix of fact and fiction
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