Matt's Reviews > Frankenstein

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs…”
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Frankenstein is a marvelous example of a book that escaped from its author and took on an entirely new existence beyond the boundaries of the page. There is an elegant symmetry to this. After all, the novel concerns a “monster” or “daemon” that slips away from its creator, the scientist Victor Frankenstein, to cause havoc in the world.

Today, when we think of Frankenstein – or more accurately, about scientist Victor Frankenstein’s never-named creature – we are likely imagining something other than the somewhat vaguely-described human-ish thing in Mary Shelley’s 1818 horror classic. Unmoored from its literary roots, the Frankenstein’s monster we call forth in our minds is probably closer in conception to Boris Karloff’s famous version from the 1930s: square-headed and scarred, with metal bolts in the neck. This is a visage that is ubiquitous every October, found in movies, on television, and selling Halloween candy.

Part of the fun of reading Frankenstein is to see how far this cobbled-together man has traveled from Shelley’s original iteration. Frankly, this was probably the only fun I had, as Frankenstein, for all its bursts of creativity, its sudden flashes of discrete violence, is a bit of a wordy drag. It is fully a piece from the Romantic era, from the overwrought emotional excesses of its characters, to the gorgeous, travelogue-like descriptions of the Alps.

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According to Shelley – in an 1831 forward to the revised text – Frankenstein had its genesis in a spontaneous parlor game between famed wordsmiths, of which she took part. Only eighteen at the time, Shelley was vacationing in Lake Geneva with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the famous Lord Byron. Byron apparently suggested they each write a ghost story, since the weather was too lousy to do much else. Mary Shelley’s contribution, according to this lore, was Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The short story she began in a cold and dispiriting Switzerland eventually became a full-length novel that is currently enjoying a two-hundred year afterlife.

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As an aside, Shelley’s life, and her relationship with the doomed Percy, is worth exploring. There is free love, unfounded suggestions that Percy penned Frankenstein, and tragedy aplenty.

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Frankenstein utilizes an epistolary framing device, both beginning and ending with a series of “letters” from an adventurous mariner to his sister. Initially, I was entirely uncertain what these missives had to do with Frankenstein and his monster. As a result, the novel started extremely slow for me, as I found myself reading only a couple pages at a time before losing interest, never really finding the hook. Ultimately – as you can see – I pushed through, but it was only much later, when the letters reappear at the end, that everything clicked into place (and I went back and reread the opening gambit).

Once this prelude is out of the way, we begin the main part of the narrative, which is told in the first-person by the emotionally labile Frankenstein. For reasons put down to obsession, young Frankenstein is preoccupied with creating new life. Working alone and in fanatical devotion to his goal, Frankenstein begins assembling his thing:

I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation: my eye-balls were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.

It does not – should not – spoil anything to say that Frankenstein is successful in his endeavors, at least up to a point.

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The monster or creature or daemon or whatever you’d like to call it – just don’t call it Frankenstein – comes to life and immediately begins to torment Victor. Unlike the shambling, slow-moving, slow-witted monster of modern pop culture, Shelley’s creature moves faster than the zombies in 28 Days Later, climbs mountains like Sly Stallone in Cliffhanger, and is an exceptionally advanced autodidact, not only teaching himself to speak, but to read Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s Lives.

Frankenstein and his monster engage in a globetrotting game of cat-and-mouse, which might have been exciting, if not written in the overly formal, cluttered style of the early nineteenth century. Shelley tells this story broadly, seldom taking any time to build a scene, ratchet up suspense, or pay off a plot arc. Instead, through the excitable, often operatically frantic voice of Frankenstein, we are given broad characters (Elizabeth, for instance, seems to be a forerunner of Dickens’s saintly – and boring – Esther Summerson), unexciting action, and pointedly telegraphed plot points. It says something that the high point of Frankenstein is a story-within-a-story (in true Conradian fashion) told by the monster itself.

Honestly, I have a predisposition against books written in the archaic-feeling style of Frankenstein. It is something I always thought I’d grow out of as I aged. Alas, it has been two decades since high school, and my bias against writers who use thee and thy still abides.

That is not to say I recommend skipping this novel, because I don’t. I also did not hate it, not by any means. The story works better in summary than in execution, and it requires close attention, but it is a genuine triumph of imagination. It is also far more polished and thematically coherent than Bram Stoker’s later attempt at Gothic horror (which has also turned out to be undying).

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Certain books have meanings beyond the composition of sentences and the contours of a storyline. Shelley created something in Frankenstein that has endured for a couple centuries, and will likely live on forever, as long as people read. For that reason – if not only for that reason – this classic example of a thinking person’s horror novel is worth checking out.