[I read this 1940 novella in two halves, writing about the first half before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
2 June 2025
First half—to the arrival of the ship
This has the feel of a surrealist thought experiment. It’s the right era, by a great friend of Jorge Luis Borges, and I’m reminded of those disorientating mid-20th Century films by Bunuel. The first-person narrator—we’re reading the feverish diary he is writing on a tropical island he has fled to—is the most unreliable of narrators. We can’t be sure of anything that happens to him, because he doubts his own senses, and he even mistrusts his own memories. Is he really a fugitive from justice, and did he really reach the island in a rowing boat? And as for the crowd of smart people, dressed in the fashions of ten years earlier, the reader doubts their reality long before the narrator begins to speculate on his own sanity. Events are so bizarre on the island he wonders whether he is in an asylum, and everything is a hallucination. Or is everything he sees part of a plot to trap him, so he can be returned to face the mysterious trial he keeps mentioning?
Is he the victim, as he says, of a justice system designed to condemn men like him without due process? Or, is he the victim of some sort of mental breakdown? Or something else? He has a habit, in his desperate attempts to reach the truth of what is happening, of listing what seem to be the options. In this case, he lists five, one of which is that these are aliens from another planet, the language they speak sounding like French but with all the words having different meanings. Another is that he and the fashionable crowd are both on the island, but exist on different planes of reality. It would account for the fact that he seems to be invisible to them… but another explanation, which he dismisses, is that a disease that is notorious on the island has literally made him invisible. It has taken him almost half the book, to where I’ve read now, to realise that the people aren’t snobs who ignore him because of his dishevelled appearance.
Before this, he has been the subject of another kind of thought experiment. When the people first appear, after he has been living alone on the island for some days, he doesn’t know what we know. He’s in a fiction, so it’s easy for us to see why the woman he’s quickly become obsessed by ignores him. He literally isn’t there—a difficult concept for a person to accept when he thinks this is reality. The poor man goes through days of torture, thinking that she ignores him through contempt of his efforts to attract her attention or, worse, through pity. And his attempts to humiliate the man he considers his rival, the bearded Morel of the book’s title, are comically inept. He makes a garden for the woman which, of course, neither she nor Morel can even see. As usual in this first half of the novel, the narrator blames himself. It was a dreadful garden, so who would pay it any attention?
His realisation that he is not experiencing any kind of recognisable reality becomes a central issue. Thought experiments often hinge on the nature of reality, and our man does his best to come to terms with this. He comes up with other alternatives, often putting into doubt the certainties by which human beings live. Maybe he is dead, and only his ghost is left on the island? Or maybe they are the ones who are dead? He isn’t the only one—this reader was having the same idea—that there has been some kind of time-slip. Is he witnessing events of things that happened years ago, when the Modernist-sounding buildings on the island were new, and the swimming pool wasn’t a clogged-up nest of frogs and snakes?
This seems to be confirmed by the fact that when, after twenty days on the island, the people disappear and leave no trace of ever having been there. Food he left on the table before their arrival is still there—a table the guests had been using in the meantime—dried-up and rotten. Meanwhile the features of the décor that he found as ruins, like the aquarium and that swimming pool, are as good as new while the people are there.
Approaching the half-way point, I’m beginning to wonder if the narrator isn’t the only one who has mistaken what kind of reality this is. My first thought was of a Bunuelesque satire of the human condition, one in which nobody ever knows what’s going on. The way the people seem to be going through the motions somehow, even repeating cnversations they’ve already had. This gives the narrator the chance to congratulate himself—he’s stumbled on a dark truth, he thinks, that nobody really ever says anything original. But his judgments always seem to be wide of the mark, so he’s probably wrong. And what’s with the futuristic science of the place? Everything seems to depend on futuristic machines using tide power to generate electricity. Meanwhile, the décor is, or would have been a decade or so before, expensively modern. It all looks too good to be true.
The people return, as if from nowhere—he certainly never sees them arriving. And suddenly, at sunset, there are two suns, followed by two moons. Has this anything to do with the fact that they are all going to leave the island on the ship that has just arrived. After all, says Morel (I think), they have been there for a week now. The narrator isn’t the only one to do a double-take when he says that. According to his diary, they’ve been there for something like a month. Except for when they take some existential time out.…
Time to read on.
The second half
About 20 pages from the end—of something like 100—I decided I’m quite impressed by this book. I felt Casares had done a really good job of throwing me off the right scent, even though there are plenty of clues as to what is happening if you look for them. The narrator had an excuse—his experiences were bound to lead him to question reality, because things around him are based on scientific possibilities he couldn’t possibly know about. An analogy, not unlike Morel’s own, would be a man brought up away from civilisation were to be shown a film—or, even better, a 3D film. He would think he was witnessing reality, and would have no idea of the truth. He would start to imagine all sorts of possibilities, and perhaps even question his own sense of what is real.
So, now we’re into the second half of the book, both the narrator and the reader need to be brought up to speed as to what really is going on. It isn’t madness, or an alien civilisation, or hallucinations caused by eating dangerous plants and roots. It’s science. Not real science, you understand, but science fiction science, in which a few years of development can lead to devices which, in reality, could either never exist or would really take a century or more to come about. (For the smartphone to exist—which might have been imagined decades ago as the invention of a single genius in a science fiction story, the expertise of tens of thousands of developers was necessary, in many different fields.) So, as in most popular science fiction, it’s a kind of magic science. Morel’s device, a hybrid of different technologies, only explains the phenomenon on the island if we choose—as we always do—to suspend all our disbelief.
The thing is, I didn’t realise I was reading science fiction. I always scrupulously avoid finding out anything about a book before I read it, so I was looking in the wrong direction all along. Which, I bet, is exactly what Casares wanted me to do. The reader’s confusion is the narrator’s, until everything is explained. In order to unpack it all, Casares needs a scene like that in a whodunit when the detective explains to the assembled company exactly how everything happened. It comes quite some way from the end, because Casares is interested in developing another aspect of his story as a kind of coda, the narrator’s unattainable love for a woman he’s never met before. I’ll come back to that.
The magic science is Morel’s device for reproducing not only sound and vision, like a movie camera, but temperature, smell, and even the tangible feel of reality. It’s like the Holodeck in Star Trek, the Next Generation which allows crew members to enter what seems to be a reality that is, in fact, entirely computer-generated. As we all know, Star Trek is full of magic science, so why not this as well? Of course, as Morel explains it to the assembled company—by now, the narrator knows that none of them, including Morel and Faustine, is really there—we know it’s all impossible. What Morel has is a set of camera-like devices that can capture the whole of a scene, even the solidity and position of a door. This accounts for why the narrator can’t budge a closed door if it’s generated by the device in its projector mode, and why even a curtain feels solid, as though carved from wood. Unlike the 24th Century Holodeck, Morel’s projection isn’t interactive…
…and that’s because it was never designed to be seen. He really is a mad scientist, and had spent years of his life perfecting a device that would capture a perfect week, after which he and his friends would be able to repeat their glamorous lives forever. The madness lies in more than one direction. First, Morel never makes a convincing case for his projection ever being more than that, a recorded loop of recorded time that does not actually reconstitute any of the participants’ lived experience. It only looks (and sounds, and feels, and even smells) like them doing stuff, it doesn’t make it them. Second, and Morel is telling his friends this for the first time now, the device slowly kills you. He tells them it’s worth it, because even though they will all be dead before they leave the ship, their magical week will always be there, on the deserted island, for as long as power reaches the projectors. Which, he assures them, his super-generators will guarantee.
At the hands of a different writer, that would be that. The nutty professor has left a useless projection of a week’s activities to play forever for the doubtful benefit of its now dead participants. But Casares hadn’t set up all those existential (and psychosexual) themes simply to drop them all now. The narrator is still on the island, and thinking about how he is going to live without the possibility of ever being with his beloved Faustine. Sure he will be able to see her, having conversations with Morel and the others—to Morel’s chagrin, his hoped-for affair with her never did come to pass during the week—but what fun would that be? And how can he return to a world in which she has been dead for ten years and more already? Besides, he really is a fugitive, from a right-wing political system that is hunting down dissidents.
Between them, he and the author come up with a cunning plan. In fact, it’s the narrator’s plan, and it’s exactly—I mean exactly—as mad as Morel’s. It’s the author’s job to simply furnish him with the wherewithal to follow it through. He has the narrator fiddle about with the machinery—except for the power generators, which are impenetrably enclosed—and realise that it’s all easy to use. He can be with Faustine, and not merely as a passive observer. All he needs to do is insinuate himself into every moment of the action as it is projected, and record himself doing it. Which is exactly what he does. As long as he remains alive—his skin is already peeling off him, and his nails have fallen out as he writes for the last time—he can watch himself sitting with her, behind her as she plays cards, even lying on the rock-hard bedclothes next to her.
Does he realise it’s all nonsense, because it will always be just an illusion? At the end, yes and no. Yes, it only looks as though he is with her: ‘I can still see my image moving about with Faustine. I have almost forgotten that it was added later; anyone would surely believe we were in love and completely dependent on each other. Perhaps the weakness of my eyes makes the scenes appear this way. In any case, it is consoling to die while watching such satisfactory results. / My soul has not yet passed to the image; if it had, I would have died, I (perhaps) would no longer see Faustine, and would be with her in a vision that no one can ever destroy.’
OK, so no one can destroy it—until the generators rot away, as neither Morel nor the narrator ever considers…. But there’s always hope. That’s the nature of obsessive love. You end up hoping that God, or some undefined scientific equivalent of God, will magically come to your eternal rescue: ‘To the person who reads this diary and then invents a machine that can assemble disjoined presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety.’
Fingers crossed.
We can read it for you wholesale 