The isle of lies

"The isle of lies" by M. P. Shiel is a novel written in the early 20th century. It follows Professor Reid’s account of Dr. Lepsius, a brilliant but unscrupulous scientist who steals an ancient stele, then breeds and raises a child in isolation on a Hebridean island to create a mind capable of deciphering it. The story centers on the manufactured prodigy Hannibal, the desperate father who built his world on deceptions, and the crisis that erupts when the boy first meets the real world.

The opening of the book recounts Lepsius’s daring theft of a Coptic-inscribed stele from an Abyssinian island monastery, a raid that sparks violence and scandal. Back in London, unable to decode the last, crucial words, he vows to “make a man” who can: he marries Molly O’Hara, and after her death in childbirth, raises their son Hannibal on the island of Shunter within a carefully faked “world” that exalts an idealized “Man.” Nineteen years on, Hannibal proves preternaturally skilled yet emotionally stunted; when given the stele he reads nearly all but fails at the final three words, asks for time, and disappears the same day as a yacht touches the island. A shift to the yacht’s maid, Jeanne Auvache, shows the runaway youth secretly boarding, binding and gagging her, and urgently demanding marriage and secrecy—revealing his strange innocence and the first collision between the lie-built prodigy and society.