• Title: Frankenstein
• Author: Mary Shelley
• Genre/Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: Oxford World Classics
• Publication Date: 1818
• Start date: 10/24/24
• Finish date: 11/12/24

Review:

What a good book. I bet you thought I was going to say what a great book. This was good, but not great. If you’re an English teacher or a Shelley devotee I will understand if you want to hit me in the head with a first edition, but I just, well let me explain.

The mystique of Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus archetype, this preceeded my reading of the book, which did not in my opinion live up to the hype. The story of how Frankenstein came to be written is more interesting to me than the novel itself, but more on that later.

Okay, so first off there is no green skinned monster with bolts sticking out the side of his head. I have no idea who came up with that iconic look but I’m suspecting it came from the early days of motion pictures and sort of stuck. Secondly, and I do this too, the monster is not called Frankenstein, that is the name of his creator Victor Frankenstein. But what can we do after a century of pop culture assigning the creator’s name to the creation?

The book is undoubtedly a classic, and deserves its place in the literary canon. It is also a pioneering book for women writing as women, so after this you didn’t need to be Currer Bell or George Eliot to get published. So I want to be clear that this is an excellent novel, just with some reservations on my part.

The genesis of the book, as I mentioned above, is a very interesting tale in and of itself. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was courting Mary Wollstonecraft in the summer of 1814. The trouble with this was that he was already married. So they eloped to the continent to be together. I bet they had great sex, like superb toe curling stuff. They met up with Byron and Polidori near Geneva in the summer of 1816. Now here is where the story gets really interesting. In 1815 an Indonesian volcano named Mt. Tambora blew its top. And blew it hard. This was the largest volcanic explosion in recorded history and it had the highest death toll. This was before smartphones and even before Mr. Morse and his telegraph so nobody in Europe had any idea this happened. So what? The explosion and ash cloud released into the atmosphere caused dramatic climate changes all over the world. 1816 was later known to history as the year without a summer. Frosts in June, heavy flooding from extreme rain events, and this in turn led to crop failures, food shortages and even famines. So this led to the party of poets stuck indoors for most of the time and bored. Lord Byron struck upon the idea of having a ghost story writing contest among the company. While he and the others all began stories, Mary was the only one to complete a story and that story was Frankenstein.

Frankenstein was first published anonymously in three volumes in 1818. A second edition was a word for word reprint but in two volumes published in 1823. The third edition in 1831 was extensively revised by Mary Shelley and remains the edition that all subsequent edtions including this one are based upon.

Frankenstein isn’t scary or spooky in the way that Dracula is, so you won’t jump out of your chair during your read of it. What Frankenstein is, what the book explores, is ethical and moral quandaries. If you create a monster, how far are you responsible for it? And if you create a monster with a monstrous nature, how much is it responsible for actions that it is in its nature to perform? If you release a pack of wolves on a farm and they kill cattle, is that the responsibility of the wolves, or you for releasing them?

The brilliance of Frankenstein is that these questions are never resolved but rather left hanging for you to decide. And for 200 years readers and scholars have been puzzling over these issues. I have opinions, but they will be different from other people, which again makes this book such a significant work of speculative literature. SF before SF was cool.

Okay, so you may be asking, what didn’t I like? Parts of the book took suspension of disbelief too far. Imagine a giant, monstrous man living for months in a hovel so close to a peasant cottage that he can see inside and the occupants have no idea he is there until he reveals himself. Can you? I can’t, and I’ve known a few peasants in my time. Large portions of the novel read like a travel diary (Shelley published one of those as well and some of it is word for word transposed into Frankenstein) and while quite beautifully described it really does nothing to advance the narrative. And finally, as I mentioned there is no green skin, no battery terminals in the temples, really nothing. So the monster is described as monstrous, huge, but there is nothing that goes beyond that to explain what he looks like and this bothers me. In my head its just a big dude kind of flitting amongst shadows but nothing more specific, and this I found frustrating.

This was a good read, time well spent, and an excellent novel with the reservations I have noted. You should read this and maybe you’ll love it, generations of people have without reservation and I hope that this will be enjoyed for generations to come. All in all, well done Mary Shelley on writing a book for the ages.