Reviews - Riverside Public Library

Booklist Reviews

Imagine that Edward Hyde, the alter ego of Dr. Jekyll, wasn't the animalistic creature Robert Louis Stevenson created. Imagine, instead, that he was just a man and a misunderstood one at that. That's Levine's approach to this revisionist take on Stevenson's classic tale, which is reprinted here, after Levine's own story has come to a close. Levine's version, narrated by Hyde, begins just before Stevenson's ends: Hyde is concealed in Jekyll's laboratory, Jekyll's letter to his lawyer awaits discovery, Hyde waits to die. Hyde takes us back through the preceding months, covering the same ground as Stevenson but from a new perspective: Hyde as a newborn man, struggling to understand the world he's been thrust into, driven by desperation to commit the acts recounted by Stevenson. We realize, in the process, how little Stevenson really explored Edward Hyde, how Hyde was a function of the narrative, an idea but not a fleshed-out man. Giving him flesh and humanity, Levine makes him a kind of tragic hero and gives the original version an added dramatic and emotional dimension. A fascinating companion piece to a classic story. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

BookPage Reviews

A classic reimagined

Not unlike Frankenstein, that other Gothic masterwork of the 19th century, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—originally published in 1886—is a surprisingly slight book whose enduring impact has far outstripped its original ambitions. At barely a hundred pages, it is a quickly read novella, as noteworthy for what is left unsaid as for what is portrayed. This classic good vs. evil fable has provided the template and inspiration for an array of adaptations and interpretations over the last century and a quarter. The latest is Hyde, Daniel Levine's ambitious and imaginative literary debut.

Hyde invites readers into the confused mind of Dr. Jekyll's fascinating alter ego.

Touted as the first time the story has been retold from Hyde's point of view—a claim that might be impossible to prove—Hyde is a far more psychologically probing work than the original. Levine has made a shrewd narrative choice crafting the story in the first person, which invites readers directly into the confused and conflicted mind of Dr. Jekyll's fascinating alter ego. Stevenson's story was born of a dream he had, and as Levine writes with post-Jungian insight in an introduction to the original tale—which the publisher has thoughtfully included in its entirety at the end of the volume—"Dreams span universal across human consciousness, evoking the primal fantasies and neuroses that define our peculiar species. Jekyll and Hyde's extraordinary success can be linked not so much to its clever artistry as to its conjuration of our most nightmarish fascination: the horror of self-transformation. . . . The story is a veil masquerading as truth, stiffened into a simplified metaphor of human duality. But the dream lives behind it, complex and primeval, the untold tale of the inner man, the sociopath, the other I."

Taking the parameters of Stevenson's story, but deepening and extending the details, Levine allows us to view Hyde not merely as the venal incarnation of Jekyll's soul, but as a fully fledged character in his own right—and, in many ways, a sympathetic one as well, as the unwitting end product, or victim if you will, of Jekyll's violation of nature. The violence and the murders are here, but seen from Hyde's perspective, they are often explainable in ways that Stevenson's readers could not have imagined. Indeed, Levine answers many questions that Stevenson left unexplored. In the process, Hyde is offered up as a misunderstood outsider, a man who is riled by injustice and feels the pain of the mistreated. So, when he becomes the target of hatred and the quarry of a mysterious vigilante, we come to understand that guilt, if there is any, should be laid at the feet of Jekyll, not Hyde.

Levine is quite adept at lending his narrative a Victorian flavor. Hyde reads less like a historical novel written in our century than a work of its age, with one reservation, of course: Levine has the benefit of post-Freudian hindsight, and even as Hyde struggles to understand his own motivations, his self-knowledge is perhaps a bit "modern," even if we allow for the fact that his host mind belongs to the "alienist" Dr. Jekyll. This is a visually dark and viscerally brooding tale that avails itself of a cinematic style of storytelling that, of course, Stevenson could never have imagined. And given the lean narrative skeleton Stevenson's original provides, Levine at times tries to layer on too much skin. Still, Hyde is an entertaining and intriguing work, as much a meditation on and extrapolation of Stevenson's original intentions as a freestanding work of popular fiction. With compelling intensity, Levine makes a noteworthy literary debut.

Kirkus Reviews

Levine debuts with a dark literary-fiction re-imagining of the macabre tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Dr. Jekyll's an "alienist," precursor of the psychiatrist, but it's Hyde who seizes control and rips the narrative open. Jekyll's studied in Paris recently, supposedly treating a man with multiple personalities, but after returning from France, Jekyll has befuddled those who know him best with his machinations--Utterson, his attorney, Lanyon, a fellow physician, and Poole, his butler. It seems he's brought chemicals that provoke an exchange of one personality for another, and secretly, Jekyll's dosing himself. Levine's rendering of bustling Victorian London, misty-cold winters and summers "filled with gauzy lemony light," provides the stage for Hyde's midnight, fog-shrouded ramblings from tavern to brothel. Levine's tale is dense, layered, sometimes obscure, its twisted origins resting with Jekyll's dead father, who inflicted upon the boy perverse sexual manipulations and other cruelties. With the potion, the buried perversions flower as Hyde plunges into London's debauched quarters, driven by Jekyll's sexual deviations. Hyde beds Jeannie, 14-year-old street girl, and then installs her at a derelict mansion he's leased, only to recognize he's acting out Jekyll's impotence in consummating a sexual relationship with married Georgiana, a lost love. Levine's characters are fully realized, but many are abandoned in narrative cul-de-sacs: a housekeeper, a Tarot reader, a maid who has been raped. Levine's masterful in his surrealistic observations of Hyde subsuming Jekyll. Hyde is all unfettered compulsion yet selfishly connected to his better nature because "[h]e was my hideout, my sanctuary." The fracture comes with Hyde's murder of Jekyll's acquaintance, Sir Danvers X. Carew, MP, part of the London Committee for the Suppression of Traffic in Young English Girls, after which Hyde-Jekyll retreat to an abandoned surgery with a dwindling supply of the chemical catalyst. Cleverly imagined and sophisticated in execution, this book may appeal to those who like magical realism and vampire stories, but the latter should know that the book is more intellectual than thriller. Copyright Kirkus 2013 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

It's Mr. Hyde's turn as unreliable narrator in this literary reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Accused of murder and sexual trafficking of minors, Hyde has hidden himself in Jekyll's closet. As he awaits discovery he unfurls a tale that sheds doubt on Jekyll's innocence—but does it absolve Hyde? Levine's palette includes every shade of gray as he explores moral ambiguity and mental anguish in this psychological gothic. VERDICT Levine's debut novel is deviously plotted but relies a great deal on readers having a close familiarity with the parent text, while the anachronistically graphic descriptions of sex and violence may be off-putting for some. On the other hand, readers who enjoy the grittier crime fiction of Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy, and John Connolly might give it a try.—Liv Hanson, Chicago

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Narrated by Dr. Henry Jekyll, Robert Louis Stevenson's classic embodiment of the dark side of the human consciousness, this ambitious first novel provides an alternate perspective on Jekyll's chemical experiments on the split personality. Edward Hyde first emerges independent of Jekyll on the streets of London in 1884—not as the malevolent brute that Stevenson conjured, but as a member of the lower classes who is fiercely protective of his and Hyde's friends and interests. But over the course of two years, Hyde develops a reputation for evil that confounds him—and that he suspects is being engineered by Jekyll, whose consciousness lurks inside his own, steering him into certain assignations and possibly committing atrocities while in his form. Levine slowly unfolds the backstory of Jekyll's schemes for Hyde, relating to his earlier failed "treatment" of a patient with a multiple-personality disorder, and traumatic events from Jekyll's own childhood that come to light in the novel's tragic denouement. Levine's evocation of Victorian England is marvelously authentic, and his skill at grounding his narrative in arresting descriptive images is masterful (of the haggard, emotionally troubled Jekyll, he writes, "He looked as if he'd survived an Arctic winter locked within a ship frozen fast in the wastes"). If this exceptional variation on a classic has any drawback, it's that it particularizes to a single character a malaise that Stevenson originally presented belonging universally to the human condition. (Mar.)