Style
The book starts with the Doctor giving up his dream of lengthening human life with discoveries he made on the Moon, and showing signs of despair. The tone of the passages for the first time acknowledges 'nature red in tooth and claw': another of the Doctor's experiments, a house where scavengers and parasites can live without harming other creatures, is also doomed to failure.
The Doctor then receives an urgent call to rescue what is literally his oldest friend: Mudface the Giant Turtle, who was a passenger on Noah's Ark. We finally hear Mudface's tale of the Great Flood which was missing from Doctor Dolittle's Post Office. Mudface's account of the Flood and its aftermath takes up most of the book, and it is by no means a jolly story. There are many references to genocide and slavery; not to mention a passage where animals gather outside a hut to devour the humans inside (a young man and his beloved, who are the most sympathetic characters next to Mudface and his mate).
Comedy is reduced to a mere sprinkling, just enough to lighten some of the more dark passages. The book stands alone in style but with, arguably, some of Hugh Lofting's most powerful writing.
Also of note is that Lofting's depiction of African characters is far less caricatured than in previous novels.
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Read more about this topic: Doctor Dolittle And The Secret Lake
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes—countrysides and figures, movements and gestures—how could he have a style, that is originality?”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)