The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Coming Clean About LOST

Several years ago I was induced by my grandchildren to watch seven seasons’ worth of the television series LOST during summer holidays. Filmed in Hawaii from 2004 to 2010, the series recounted the increasingly strange existence of the survivors of a trans-Pacific flight on an apparently uncharted, and possibly uncharitable, island. Often tedious, always unexpected, the tale, I decided, was either an invention beyond my abilities to appreciate, or it was utter nonsense, with no overall plot or plan for an ending. Turns out it was a bit of both.

Although I have read nothing to confirm this conclusion, it is entirely clear to me that LOST is merely a derivative version of Bioy Casares novella, The Invention of Morel. At least three versions of the 1949 the book had been made into films during the 1960's and 70's. These were explicitly credited to Bioy Casares. But as far as I am aware there is no mention of him as the inspiration for the LOST series. Yet the substance of his book is identical to that of the series, with a few twists thrown into the series reflecting more modern tastes and technologies. Here are my main points of comparison:

1. Both the series and the book take place on a remote island which is inaccessible by normal means. This is explained in the book as due to a reef and an illness, but not in the series which relies on unexplained physical phenomena. The precise means of entry and exit from the island remains a mystery in both.

2. Bioy has a single protagonist who arrives on the island as a fugitive from justice for some indeterminate crime for which he feels both guilt and shame. In LOST this transforms into a plane-load of survivors most of whom are also fugitives, either from the law or from intolerable social conditions. All the main characters feel guilt and shame and demonstrate the same sort of paranoia as Bioy's.

3. There is architectural evidence on the islands in both the book and the series of a previous habitation, modern buildings of unknown purpose, which have been abandoned but left in serviceable condition.

4. Within these structures are found various sophisticated technologies of indeterminate function that are powered by a natural but novel source of tremendous energy. In the series this source is an intense magnetic field, in the book it is tidal forces.

5. These technologies, it is eventually revealed, both allow time travel within the island and provide immortality to its inhabitants. There are relatively minor differences in the series and the book having mainly to do with the level of contemporary technological development reached in each case.

6. The characters in the series mirror those in the book. LOSTS's Ben Linus is the same Californian-esque cult leader as Morel. Bioy's protagonist and his 'female lead', Faustine are the series Jack Shepherd and his sometime enamorata Juliet, this latter being the focus of rivalry by the male characters in both.

7. Several other tropes and devices from Bioy are used repeatedly in the series: half-heard conversations, dream-like sequences, and so on. Others are scarcely concealed variants. For example, in Bioy, trees on the island die before maturity; in the series, it is infants who die.

The parts of the television series which were comprehensible to me were precisely those written by Bioy. I appreciated them as creative and innovative even 60 years later. The rest was indeed junk. And yet not a mention of the real source by the tv producers. Shameful

View all my reviews