I'm fascinated by plot points and twists that are so good, they carry the book, regardless of what else isn't working. Popular fiction writers these days generally give their readers a certain kind of book written in a certain way, delivering a certain experience. In the infancy of "popular" fiction, writers, I think, would have consciously had more creative leeway. I just read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. My son had it assigned for his British lit trimester, and that was a good enough reason for me to fill in what I considered a major gap in my have-read list of classics.

It's a strange, basically long short story, which was my first surprise — that a short story could be become so famous, with characters that have become not not only a common part of the English language but I'm betting other languages as well. It begins as a crime story, wraps up as more of a morality tale, has three narrators in 61 pages, major vagaries which are somewhat attributable to the nineteenth century language, but others that are intentional, like the mysterious nature of the prurient interests that call to Dr. Jekyll.  And yet despite all these "problems," the book so works.

Back to plot twists, where we started. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are two aspects of the one man, Dr. Henry Jekyll. Through "metaphysical" research, Dr. Jekyll manages to transform himself into Mr. Hyde, an individual who has no intellectual connection with Dr. Jekyll. Written during the Victorian period, a time that espoused sexual repression, Mr. Hyde is the evil/lustful side of Dr. Jekyll, the part that Dr. Jekyll has only indulged very sporadically, and with definite guilt. What I love about this story, is that Robert Louis Stevenson didn't use just the lure of indulging in the prurient to draw Dr. Jekyll to his doom, the obvious plot reason for Dr. J to become so enamored with his alter ego Mr. Hyde. That's certainly part of it, but RLS, as he was known, didn't stop there.  Dr. Jekyll is a man up in his years, experiencing the infirmities of advancing age. The plot double grabs the reader because since Dr. J he has not indulged his immoral side to any great lengths, the Mr. Hyde that emerges is a much younger man. So when Dr. J transforms into Mr. Hyde, not only does he throw off the sexual restrictions of his time, he throws off the physical constrictions of his age. Brilliant.

Even as this new popular novel form began to evolve and take hold, Stevenson was criticized up and down for all the supposed problems with his story, places he'd not achieved what literary conventions would suggest. Yet well over a hundred years later, his characters are household words, we're still reading his book, and if I'm any measure, the story remains absolutely unforgettable. Forget conventions and "proper" writing techniques, the success of a darn good story, however supposedly flawed, then or now, always gives me hope.