Dr Jekyll and Mr Seek

Anthony O’Neill

Black & White, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

THERE appears to be no end in sight to the outpouring of sequels or prequels to literary classics. Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett (Gone With The Wind), Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (Jane Eyre), P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley (Pride and Prejudice) and Francois Ceresa’s Cosette (Les Miserables) are just a few of the best-known examples from this flourishing branch of publishing.

Into this crowded market comes Dr Jekyll and Mr Seek (“If he be Mr Hyde, I shall be Mr Seek,” exclaimed Jekyll’s lawyer Gabriel Utterson in the Robert Louis Stevenson original), by Anthony O’Neill, originally from Melbourne but now resident in RLS’s home city of Edinburgh, where the book makes a brief detour in its second half.

It takes place seven years after the events of the original. Gabriel Utterson, named in Jekyll’s will as his beneficiary, is set to inherit the scientist’s London townhouse, the required time since Jekyll’s disappearance and presumed death having elapsed. With less than a week to go before the house becomes legally his, he finds it has been occupied by a man who claims to be Henry Jekyll, returned from a long sojourn abroad, during which he suffered from amnesia.

Only Utterson knows that this interloper cannot be Henry Jekyll, because only he is aware that Jekyll and the deceased Mr Hyde were the same person. He has kept Jekyll’s secret, and his confessional manuscript, to himself. To prove that this man is an imposter he would not only have to betray the confidence of his late friend but attempt to convince London society with a scarcely believable tale of a potion which can transform a man into his unfettered, libidinous shadow self. The fact that Utterson stands to gain a desirable townhouse if Jekyll remains missing undermines what slender credibility he might have.

But when Utterson finally meets the pretender, he too is struck by the perfect resemblance to his old friend, and his case against the imposter, despite some suspicious deaths, begins to unravel. Were the events of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a mere hallucination on Utterson’s part? Ah, but what of the manuscript, written in Jekyll’s own hand, that confessed all? Yes, what of it? Did it ever actually exist outside of Utterson’s mind?

O’Neill’s prose retains much of RLS’s tone, but his is a somewhat less flowery rendition, pared back to the storytelling essentials and more suited to present-day tastes. It’s short and to the point, moves like the clappers and can be read in an afternoon. He takes the original, which dwelt on the duality of man, and flips it sideways, focusing this sequel on the contemporary concern of identity theft while deconstructing and casting doubt on the events of the original. Reimagined in this way, it seems as much like a companion piece as a sequel, and one feels that master storyteller RLS would have smiled with guarded approval at the direction O’Neill had taken his ideas.