I had been warned (by a Stevenson fan) that Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is not, in fact, very good. All the same, I was curious: it's usually interesting to read the original of something that has been adapted and retold countless times. A good compromise seemed to be to try an audiobook version of the story, read by Martin Jarvis, no less. I did enjoy it – it's not very long, a comparatively easy listen, and has a Victorian-novel atmosphere which I was ready for after having read (and listened) to a row of modern, not very demanding books. But it's certainly no Treasure Island, and I would probably have been sorely disappointed if I'd started off expecting a masterpiece.
One of the problems with the novella is that by now, everyone knows the twist. It's quite hard to imagine what effect the story would have if you didn't know that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are one and the same person. After all, it's set up as a mystery: why is the reputable doctor protecting such an unsavoury young man, even going as far as to make a will in his favour? The story's first readers must have experienced a rug-pull which modern readers miss: it's not that easy to figure out what's going on if you don't already know. Yes, there are clues, but there are also a number of things pointing against Jekyll and Hyde being the same person. How come, for instance, that the doctor is a fairly large, middle-aged man, while Hyde is younger and smaller? A mysterious elixir could account for hairy hands, a villainous countenance etc. but not that, one would have thought. These things are explained at the end, though, and as twists go, Hyde being the "bad" side of Jekyll is quite a good one. Shame that, to us, it's not a twist at all.
Another problem is the curious way the story is told. I quite liked the way it started with two side characters on a walk, one telling the other of an encounter with Hyde: the sideways way into a story feels very Victorian. But then the book continues in the same vein, as we see the events largely through the eyes of Jekyll's lawyer Mr Utterson. Not until the end do we get Jekyll's side of the story. As, again, the mystery Utterson tries to figure out is no mystery to us, this feels oddly unbalanced. Various adaptations and retellings mostly focus on Jekyll, but in the original we don't learn that much about him. There isn't even a romance in danger because of the whole personality-splitting, something most Jekyll/Hyde-inspired stories manage to work in somehow. What's more, we don't learn much about Hyde either (more on this in a bit).
When it comes to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson faces what one could call the Tolkien conundrum: if you invent a concept that proves so popular it's aped over and over again, it's easy for people to forget how original your ideas were to start with. It's a bit unfair to state that more could be done with the Jekyll and Hyde idea when it was Stevenson who invented Jekyll and Hyde. There are some intriguing wrinkles to the story, too: for instance, the explanation of the youth and stature of Hyde is that Jekyll's evil side isn't very well developed, so it looks smaller and younger than Jekyll as a whole. I found it noteworthy that the tale of Jekyll and Hyde isn't about a man split into one good and one bad side; instead, Jekyll is still a "compound" of good and bad, like he always was, whereas Hyde is only bad. This means Jekyll as himself is still quite capable of doing bad things. His whole motivation for creating Hyde isn't particularly admirable: apparently, he uses him mainly as a get-out-of-jail-free card, a way to live out impulses he's ashamed of. Another interesting detail is the reason given as to why people take against Hyde right away: as human beings are a mixture of good and evil, they feel the instinctive wrongness of someone who's just evil.
But how evil is Hyde? Perhaps, if Stevenson's story is a bit underwhelming, it's partly because we don't really see Hyde doing that many terrible things. Yes, he commits a brutal murder – mostly, it seems, out of impatience with a passer-by he doesn't want to be bothered with. We also hear about him unfeelingly trampling a child underfoot (the child recovers). But these are more the actions of a boorish delinquent than a creature of pure evil. We don't see him taking delight in other people's misery. As for what he gets up to when Jekyll releases him for recreational purposes, one supposes it's mostly a question of indulging vices such as drinking and womanising, which isn't that awful. (How does Hyde manage to pull, though, if people find him so instinctively repulsive? Surely even prostitutes would try to give him a wide berth.) I came away from the story wishing I got to know more about the titular characters: but then, there are plenty of other writers who have been only to happy to expand on them.
