[ book tip by Katy Barrett ] My first reaction to Frankenstein was the overwhelming desire to slap Dr Frankenstein across the face, as he ceaselessly bewails his fate while doing nothing about the ‘creature’ he has himself created. His ‘romantic’ sensibility is not one that gels well with our twenty-first-century tastes – at least with mine. However once you get into the mindset, Frankenstein is a compelling read. If nothing else, much like in the modern crime thriller, you find you need to know how many members of Frankenstein’s family will be killed before he takes any action.  

Shelley’s classic horror story also invites a closer read. The narrative unfolds in three layers through the three narrators, and addresses questions as grandiose as the alpine and arctic landscapes in which it is evocatively set. In the outer layer, Robert Walton, hopeful arctic explorer, writes to his sister about his dreams of gaining glory through finding and mapping the magnetic north pole. On the ice, Walton encounters Dr Frankenstein speeding after the ‘creature’ he has (eventually!) resolved to destroy. Frankenstein recounts his life to Walton: his dream to find the key to creating life, and then his terror on finding he had created a hideous and malevolent creature. Within Frankenstein’s tale, the ‘creature’ in turn relates how he learnt gentleness through secretly observing a family home, but then how he turned to revenge on realising his physical difference irrevocably excluded him from such human community. The ‘creature’ powerfully portrays evil developed through education rather than nature.

Frankenstein is fascinating because of Shelley’s language of hope and despair, the window that she opens onto the struggles of eighteenth-century science, and questions that she raises about human nature and nurture. Like the ‘creature’ himself, it was beneath the surface of Frankenstein that I found its true beauty.

[ Favourite quote ] "Mine has been a tale of horrors … Know that, one by one, my friends were snatched away; I was left desolate. My own strength is exhausted, and I must tell, in a few words, what remains of my hideous narration."
“His countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes.”

[ book info ] Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein. Or, The Modern Prometheus. (original language: English) Penguin Books, 1994 (1818). ISBN: 0-14-062030-3.