The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Now I understood why novelists write about ghosts that weep and wail. The dead remain in the midst of the living. It is hard for them, after all, to change their habits--to give up smoking, or the prestige of being great lovers. I was horrified by the thought that I was invisible; horrified that Faustine, who was so close to me, actually might be on another planet; but I am dead, I am out of reach, I thought; and I shall see Faustine, I shall see her go away, but my gestures, my pleas, my efforts will have no effect on her. And I knew that those horrible solutions were nothing but frustrated hopes.

When I read Robinson Crusoe a few years ago, the most surprising thing was just how long it took him to get to the island. Not only are there several chapters before the marooning, there are multiple shipwrecks, after which Crusoe returns to dry land and sets out again. It’s only the third shipwreck that leaves Crusoe stuck on the island that would bring him literary immortality, a whole genre bearing his name, the Robinsonade.

The Invention of Morel, on the other hand, takes the opposite tack. From page one we are on the island, inside the head of one man, a nameless narrator on the run from the law, likely due to some sort of revolutionary activity he’s involved with in his native Venezuela. The narration takes the form of a diary, much of which, in the early going, is dedicated to describing the strange island, for prosperity. Small and fully traversable in a day, the island has a number of strange features: tides which do not precisely follow the moon, a number of mysterious, island-spanning machines that perform some initially unidentifiable work, and three structures, a museum (which is really more like a hotel), a chapel, and a swimming pool. And initially, our narrator is alone.

But after some days, a ship, populated with about a dozen people, lands. At first fearful of being discovered, the narrator grows bolder upon seeing Faustine, a pale woman who sits on the beach each day, whom he immediately falls madly in love with. But she doesn’t seem to see him--literally, he jumps out in front of her in an ill-conceived plan and she reacts not at all. He plants a garden and she doesn’t see it. He sits beside her and she never speaks. There are other inhabitants, including a man who rouses the narrator’s jealousy, the titular Morel, and they all seem similarly stricken. And so about one-third of the way into the book the central mystery is established, and the rest of the book will be spent speculating on and eventually solving it. Spoilers follow.

As the excerpt above indicates, and as I initially assumed, the narrator first believes he is dead, then that he is slowly being caught in some elaborate trap, then that the interlopers, including Faustine, might be aliens of some sort, but every scenario is eventually dismissed, and the narrator begins to notice that certain things seem to be repeating themselves: one day he wakes up and the ship is gone, the next it returns. Finally it becomes clear to him that he’s stuck in a loop--not that he is looping himself but that somehow the events around him are. After spending a little while creeping on Repeating-Faustine, he finally manages to follow the sequence of events and hear Morel’s speech wherein he lays out exactly what’s happening.

It turns out that Morel is something of a mad scientist and has invited his friends here to live a perfect week while being recorded by the giant machines around the island. Not recorded on video or audio only--no, Morel’s machines record everything to the extent that reality is impacted. Every movement, every smell, the position of every molecule in a person’s body, even the positions of the moons and the tides. But! It turns out that recording all this information requires something like the soul-stealing properties cameras were once thought to have, a process that causes a swift degenerative sickness and finally death as the person’s soul itself is duplicated--or trapped--within the machine, repeating the same set of events for eternity.

The friends are all horrified but of course it’s too late--they’ve already been captured. The facsimiles(?) though, have no idea that they’re in a loop, since their captured forms have only the memories they had at the moment of capture, and the big question of the book is finally whether their situation is really bad at all: are they metaphorically in Hell or in Heaven? Is it really so bad to repeat a perfect week forever for the first time, over and over and over? After all, the narrator is able to have novel experiences and what good has it done him?

Ultimately, he decides he’d rather be part of the loop than live the life he’s got, so he arranges, over a series of months, a sequence of events that integrate him into the narrative, with the intent that when this island is eventually discovered, those who see the diorama will think he and Faustine were great lovers, or at least a great love. And maybe somehow they are, even though Faustine will never, can never, know.