The Invention of Morel

Content Warning: The source material and this section of the guide contain references to suicidal ideation. The source material uses an outdated, offensive term to refer to Roma people. This language has been preserved only in quotation.

At the very beginning, the unnamed narrator announces the surprising arrival of summer. The intense heat, however, is less troubling to him than the sudden arrival of unknown visitors, who wake him up by playing a phonograph. He escapes down the ravine to avoid detection and watches them, suspicious that they might be part of a plot to capture him.

The narrator is on Villings Island, which an Italian rug merchant in Calcutta recommended to him as a place to hide from the authorities who are pursuing him for an unnamed crime. The rug seller hid him on a ship that docked in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, where a contact gave him a compass and a stolen rowboat. The narrator is experiencing lingering exhaustion from the oppressive heat and sun. The Italian told him that a group of white men came to the island in 1924 to build a chapel, museum, and swimming pool, but they abandoned it. No one has visited since because a Japanese cruiser found a ship that had docked there, and all the crew were dead. A mysterious illness attacked their bodies from the outside, leaving them without nails, hair, or skin.

The narrator observes the intruders, who dance, swim, and play “Tea for Two” and “Valencia” on their phonograph. They all wear clothes of an older style. He records his observations in a diary, from which he hopes someday to write two books: one about survivorship and the other about the philosophy of Thomas Malthus. Given his difficulties finding food and shelter, he worries that his journal will be his will. The island’s unpredictable tides vex him, as he sometimes wakes up in high water. He adopts Leonardo da Vinci’s motto of “Ostinato rigore,” meaning stubborn or tenacious rigor, as his own credo for carefully recording his observations (12).

He details the buildings on the island. They are modern and without ornamentation. He doesn’t understand why the museum is so named, as it seems more like a hotel or a “sanatorium” (14). The interior of the museum is elegant, with green and rose marble walls and bookshelves, blue window-glass, and alabaster urns with electric light. There are columns with “Indian or Egyptian” gods and drawings by the Japanese-French painter, Foujita (16). The floor of one room is an aquarium, but all the fish are dead. He takes a book by Bernard Forest de Bélidor, a French engineer, called Le Moulin Perse, or The Persian Mill, hoping to understand the mill he saw in the lowlands. He hopes to find books to assist the research he started before his trial but to no avail. His research was on immortality failing because people oppose death and insist that the whole body should be kept alive. By contrast, he believes that only the part concerned with consciousness should be preserved.

The narrator sees a skylight outside the museum but can’t find it inside. While searching for food in the basement, he breaks through one of the walls in the area where he thinks the skylight should be. Inside, he discovers a blue-tiled room with a water pump and generator. He gets the water pump working, but he doesn’t understand the purpose of the green motors.

The second time he ventures into the basement, seeking medicine, he finds a secret door to a many-sided room in a second basement. There are some mirrored panels on the walls, as well as a cork-like material. He suddenly hears footsteps coming from all around him and all over the museum. He goes upstairs to hide, but it is silent.

The next day, he continues to explore the second basement, which appears to have 14 identical rooms that he assumes are bomb shelters. He realizes that the acoustics of the rooms amplify and echo any sound. He is not sure if the people who keep playing the same records are the ones who built this building.

There is one woman in whom he takes an interest: a dark-haired woman with a colorful headscarf who sits on the rocks each evening and watches the sunset. Having given up on all human relations in his exile, the narrator now finds that he hopes to see this woman every afternoon. He tries to be alone with her, but so far, he has seen her with some fishermen and a bearded tennis player (20). He bathes, worrying that he might not make a good first impression on her.

His situation is difficult. The wood from some trees is too hard to cut, while other trees just crumble away. He eventually fashions a trap to catch birds and finds some tough roots to eat, learning to avoid the poisonous ones by trial and error. The morning tides often catch him unaware, nearly drowning him. Given his physical condition, he is uncertain at times whether the people are real or hallucinations, and if they are real, whether they would turn him in to the police.

One day in the chapel, two people suddenly appear. The narrator hides under the altar, but they don’t see him. A storm rolls in, and his puzzlement over the intruders increases, as they take their phonograph outside and dance or sprawl on the grass during the downpour.

Eventually, he falls in love with the dark-haired woman and decides to wait for her on the rocks, planning to already be watching the sunset when she arrives to show that they have similar interests. She is already there when he arrives, and he jumps out at her. He worries that he frightened her, but she gives no sign of seeing him. He speaks to her nervously, nearly shouting, but she doesn’t react. When night falls, she picks up her basket and returns up the hill. He awaits his captors, who do not come.

He tries his plan again, and the woman sits down next to him and reads a book. Not wanting to interrupt her reading, he says nothing. He feels hopeful because she keeps coming to the rocks and hasn’t reported him to the other visitors, but he thinks he should apologize. He gathers flowers and plants them in a garden shaped like the woman watching the sunset with a man kneeling in front of her. He writes an inscription in flowers: “The humble tribute of my love” (33). The woman doesn’t notice the garden when she returns to read on the shore, and the narrator presumes she is expressing her disapproval or distaste.

The narrator is plagued by bad dreams, including in which he has to kill a man during a croquet match, who turns out to be himself. The woman continues to ignore him. One day, he sees her with a tennis player and hides to watch them. They speak in French. The man, Morel, calls her Faustine and reminds her that they only have three days left. He tells her she has nothing to worry about and that they will not talk about eternity. As they leave, Morel treads on the narrator’s garden. The narrator is angry, but what angers him the most is that Faustine shows interest in Morel. The narrator, torn between hating Faustine and desiring her, wonders if he has turned invisible.