Teaser

Charlie Gordon has an IQ of 68. Until he undergoes a ground-breaking operation to boost his intelligence. But if ignorance truly was bliss, then what happens when Charlie begins to see the world as it truly is . . ?

Review

Most science fiction books disappear without a trace. even much-anticpated releases can sink like a stone within a few years. But a few become points of discussion within the science fiction community for years, or even decades. And then, every once in a blue moon, a book breaks containment, and a science fiction novel garners acclaim from the mainstream. Flowers for Algernon is one such book. I am absolutely astounded that Keyes’ novel lost out on a Hugo Award (It was beaten to the punch by Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for those who care.) but it has become a cornerstone of the meeting place between science fiction and literary fiction nonetheless.

Flowers for Algernon is an infamously depressing book. It takes someone whose low IQ has left him an outcast of society, being mocked by people he thinks are his friends, and gives him the power to see that they weren’t his friends at all. And then it slowly strips him of that newfound intellect, putting him right back where he started, but with the vague memory that he once had it better. If you’re the sort of reader who gets emotionally attached to fictional characters, then there’s a good chance you’ll end up crying by the time you turn the last page. If, like me, you don’t get so attached, you’re still in for a brutal and miserable read.

This is a book in which there are no good people. But they’re not cartoonishly evil stereotypes either. they’re bleakly realistic in the way they treat Charlie. His ‘friends’ bully him while he haplessly goes along with it. The scientists view him as no different to any other lab experiment. The women in his life abuse him, betray him, abandon him, or otherwise behave incredibly unethically around him. But before you start to feel too sorry for Charlie, you might want to know that while he starts off as an innocent victim, as soon as he begins to develop his mental faculties, he becomes insufferable. He lashes out at those who have helped him, he batters others with his new intellectual superiority, and as he begins his decline, he pushes away those who still want to help him in spite of everything. This is a book filled with absolutely horrible, yet remarkably sympathetic nonetheless, characters.

The issue I had with Flowers for Algernon is not the over-reliance on emotional manipulation. Instead it’s my other bugbear. Structure. The book is comprised of seventeen progress reports, all written by Charlie at various stages of his experience. The earlier reports are challenging to get through. Not because of their harrowing content, but because Keyes writes as Charlie would, in a semi-illiterate scrawl of jumbled sentences, missing punctuation, and spelling mistakes. Opening your book this way is a bold statement, but does leave it hard to really get into. As you might expect, these deliberate errors creep back in as Charlie begins his decline in the later stages.

I don’t think it’s far to say that I enjoyed Flowers for Algernon. It didn’t entertain me. It didn’t make me stop and say ‘wow.’ There is sense of wonder here. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. Far from it. This is a classic that absolutely deserves the badge of honour. It’s hard-hitting, and just as relevant today as it was when it was originally written six decades ago.

As a final note, Flowers for Algernon was the inaugural buddy read for the Boundary’s Edge Book Club, so a big thank you goes out to everyone who read along with us.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• First Published in 1966
• 238 Pages