04/03/2021 ‘Hyde,’ by Daniel Levine - The New York Times

The Dark Side

By Walter Kirn

May 30, 2014

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is an oblique and artful Gothic tale framed as a
detective story. The truth seeker is Jekyll’s lawyer, Utterson, the book’s most prominent character. Jekyll — the -
gentleman who dabbles in chemical self-transformation — appears only intermittently, never fully speaking for himself
until the end, when he discloses the details of the disastrous experiments that unleashed his primitive alter ego. The
novel isn’t a conventional horror story, lingering on the macabre for its own sake, but an allegory of the divided self,
perhaps also a meditation on addiction. Stevenson dramatizes human duality but doesn’t analyze its causes, treating it as
pervasive and fundamental. For him, the Jekyll-Hyde split is the split in all of us, between the animals we evolved from
and the angels we aspire to be.

“Hyde” is the first-time novelist Daniel Levine’s ingenious revision of this canonical work, an elevated exercise in fan
fiction that complicates and reorients the story by telling it from the perspective of the monster, exposing the tender heart
inside the brute and emphasizing the pathos of his predicament. Hyde is an outlet for Jekyll’s buried lusts, a
manifestation of his banished id, but he is also a person in his own right who longs for acknowledgment and recognition.
Far from being the accidental product of Jekyll’s experimental potion, he’s an integral, abiding second self who first
emerged during Jekyll’s painful childhood as a defense against severe abuse and then went dormant inside him for
decades, until the medicine reawakened him. While Stevenson casts Hyde as purely evil, a creature without a conscience,
Levine — by placing him center stage and awarding him a full measure of humanity — portrays him as a wounded
innocent, scorned, bewildered and oppressed. He dwells like a squatter in the body that he and Jekyll share, an illegal
lodger, without rights.

Levine’s book is appreciably longer than Stevenson’s, chiefly because it’s vastly more subjective, describing the tortured
Hyde’s interior life as he waits, locked in Jekyll’s house, for the authorities to catch up with him after his murder of a
member of Parliament who discovered his and Jekyll’s secret. The mood is one of frustration and claustrophobia. For as
long as he can remember, Hyde has lived as the captive of his master, able to observe the doctor’s deeds and draw
inferences from his behavior but lacking access to his thoughts. Levine exploits this unusual arrangement to invent a
hybrid point of view that fuses the first person and the third. Hyde, the “I,” refers to Jekyll as “he” and to their composite
being as “we.” This fractured perspective takes some getting used to, but eventually it feels logical and apt, elegantly -
expressing the mind’s plurality and its propensity for self-estrangement. We are many, every one of us, peering inward
and outward simultaneously and beholding our lives from conflicting, varied angles that we perpetually strive to
reconcile. For Hyde, this task is singularly difficult; his peculiar existence denies him wholeness, condemning him to
confusion and anxiety.

In “Hyde,” the outside world — Victorian London — is as byzantine as its narrator’s inner world. It’s a murky metropolis
of vice and cruelty, especially at night, which is when Hyde can most freely range about, his fearsome visage obscured by
shadows. The gaslit, mazelike, foggy city that Stevenson only lightly sketched engrosses and excites Levine, particularly
its seamy side of swarming, roaring pubs and vile back-alley brothels. Hyde is drawn to these dubious establishments by
impulses he only half understands but is powerless to check because they emanate from Jekyll, the upright scientist and
man of means for whom reason and civilized comforts have fallen short. The brothels where he seeks companionship
specialize, some of them, in supplying little girls for callous, predatory gentlemen. The girls are slaves, held hostage in
much the same way that Hyde is chained to Jekyll, suggesting a moral cleavage within society that mirrors the divided
makeup of the main character. This backdrop creates sympathy for Hyde, a being capable of many sins but immune to the
one that defines his age, hypocrisy, because he wears no public mask of virtue. He does have a gallant side, however. His
affinity for the helpless and exploited impels him to rescue a child prostitute and violently confront a prowling john.

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04/03/2021 ‘Hyde,’ by Daniel Levine - The New York Times

The language of Hyde’s long, melancholy monologue — the pleading, anguished final testament of a creature confronting
its own extinction — is earthy, lurid and unsparing, a departure from Stevenson’s smoother, more decorous prose. The
word “spittle” comes up a bit too often, and great attention is paid to noxious odors, filthy garments and uncomfortable
bodily sensations. The acts of mastication and defecation are described in graphic, grinding close-up, rendering them
equally unappealing. “Hyde,” at its core, is a novel of revulsion, its forsaken protagonist severed from true pleasure by a
nervous system that’s not his own and an acutely jarring upbringing at the hands of a stern, sadistic father. Though the
traumas the man inflicted are left vague, some are clearly sexual, the products of his eccentric, warped philosophy of
male erotic development. The boy disintegrates under this harsh regimen and brings forth Hyde, his imaginary ally and a
vessel for his rage.

By choosing to ground his protagonist’s tragic fissure in disfiguring childhood experiences, Levine makes the story feel
more contemporary but compromises its universality and somewhat dissipates its mystery, turning a fable into a kind of
memoir. The imposition of Freudian psychology on a pre-Freudian scenario feels patronizing and reductive. (Rearranging
the past to conform to present theories is one of historical fiction’s favorite tricks, but sometimes the temptation is best -
resisted.) The novel is a pleasure nonetheless, a worthy companion to its predecessor. It’s rich in gloomy, moody
atmosphere (Levine’s London has a brutal steampunk quality), and its narrator’s plight is genuinely poignant.

The best parts are those in which Hyde peers out at Jekyll as though he were a stranger, straining to understand him, to
know his thoughts. Hyde yearns, above all, for intimacy with his host, for relief from his own isolation, but it eludes him.
He’s the unconscious mind personified, submerged, ignored and desperate to be heard.

HYDE
By Daniel Levine
397 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $24.

Walter Kirnʼs most recent book is “Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Dark Side

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