I first read Flowers for Algernon as a short story in an anthology of Science Fiction about 1960 and it impressed me no end, then one day I discovered that Daniel Keyes had expanded it into a novel. I immediately bought it and read it and found it was even better than the short story. It is a book I re-read every now and again and my old 1968 copy is getting rather dog eared and tatty but this book has never gone out of print for long to my knowledge, so I will replace it one day perhaps before it falls apart.

This fine book has had a number of TV and film spin offs. It is the humanity in the story that makes it so recyclable. Poor Charlie Gordon, like Mephistopheles, he has looked upon the face of God but can never achieve heaven.

Charlie is mentally sub normal. Innocent and child-like he is dimly aware that he is missing something in life and believes that if only he could learn to read and write he would become smart like his friends in the Bakery where he works. He enrols in night school and impresses his teacher by his intense effort to improve himself.

Meanwhile a group of researchers have perfected a technique to increase intelligence with notable success on the white mouse Algernon, and now they want to try it on a human. Charlie’s teacher suggests that they use Charlie Gordon as a guinea pig.
They do, their technique works and within a few months he has become a genius going beyond the original researchers themselves. With his huge intellect, he is able to continue the research only to find there is a flaw - the effect is only temporary, with no way to make it permanent.
Soon Algernon is failing simple tests and ultimately dies. Charlie with his enhanced awareness is forced to face the appalling fact that he too will inevitably lose his new abilities and will gradually return to his old level of stupidity and probably die soon after.

You get to know Charlie as he gets to know who he is. It is easy to empathise with him because the whole book is written by Charlie himself in the form of a kind of diary, under the guise of progress reports. Starting off as a struggling illiterate, with few words he gradually improves until he is writing and expressing himself fluently, but then deteriorating again in a heartbreaking decline as Charlie sinks back into his moronic state but now with the knowledge of what the people he thought of as friends really think of him. Flowers for Algernon helps understand those less gifted with intelligence than yourself and you will see them in a different light after reading this book.
If you do not like sad endings do not read this book, it is compelling and moving but ultimately very sad but I am glad I have read it and will probably read it again and again.