Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

One of the things that science fiction writers have learned how to do in the 206 years since Frankenstein was first published is how to bring their readers along with the new elements of the world that they put into their stories. Most of the time, they take care to make the fantastic elements plausible within the world portrayed by the story, and largely consistent once the rules of the game are laid out. I can’t fault Shelley for not following this practice, exactly, since in some ways she wrote the genre of science fiction into being with Frankenstein, but the stacking one implausibility on top of another throughout the novel kept kicking me out of the story to the point that I really never went back in.

The general tale is well-known enough to need very little rehearsing: Victor Frankenstein, scientist, arguably mad, takes various parts of various bodies, and uses secret knowledge that he has discovered to infuse the parts with life. Only after all of this work does Frankenstein realize that the creature is not, to put it mildly, aesthetically pleasing in his appearance. Horrified by his creation, he runs away; when he returns the creature has fled the lab. Frankenstein collapses, and when he has been nursed back to health he does not care what has happened to the creature. Several things happen, one of which is that the creation murders Frankenstein’s younger brother. He begins to wreak vengeance on Frankenstein’s whole family. Victor confronts him in the high Alps near Chamonix, and the creature extracts a promise that Frankenstein will create a mate for him and they will depart from Europe and leave Victor and his family in peace. (Neither seems to consider that this second creature might have a will and desires of her own.) Victor reneges on his promise, and the creature continues his vengeance, killing more who are near and dear to Frankenstein. Victor then turns the tables and pursues the creature to the ends of the earth. The whole is set within a framing narrative of an Arctic explorer writing letters back to his sister in England, under the supposition that his letters will somehow find their way back even if he and his crew perish. Frankenstein has pursued the creature into this uttermost north; on the expedition’s ship he survives long enough to tell his tale and then expires. The creature is last seen in the distance, headed even further north.

So far, so much a fable of hubris, misunderstanding, and violence. The premise — that Victor Frankenstein had discovered how to imbue organic tissue with life — was not a problem, that’s the starting point for the story. That the creature could endure the elements far better than plain old humans, sure, why not. That he intuitively knew which berries to eat in the forest immediately after being turned out by Frankenstein, odd, but maybe. That he could sustain his superhuman abilities on just berries and nuts that he foraged, not really, nor that he could toddle around near the university city of Ingolstadt for weeks without being discovered. His homing instinct for where Frankenstein comes from is uncanny, not to say unbelievable. The worst for me was when the creature has Victor cornered high in the Alps and relates events from his point of view. This creation, not many months old, has a diction even more educated and convoluted than the ship captain from the framing narrative. Improbabilities tumble down the mountain: he lived for months in a room attached to a small cottage, unbeknownst to the family who lived there; he learned to speak a human language from listening to them; he grasped reading on his own having observed — through a crack in a shared wall the family never noticed — the family reading to each other; the first three works he read were books he found in a satchel in the forest — The Sorrows of Young Werther, Paradise Lost, and Plutarch’s Lives. Seriously?

Reader, I balked. I skimmed, which I found improved the experience considerably. The whole acquires a certain dark momentum when the creature describes his rampage, his murderous despair after a farmer shoots him in the shoulder. Unfortunately, the implausibilities of both character and action continue in the book’s final section. The creature is able to track Frankenstein across major bodies of water, to hide his giant and hideous self in London for weeks at a time, to follow Frankenstein across the length of England and Scotland. Frankenstein finally steels himself to make another and to this end sets up a laboratory on Orkney. How he brought his tissue samples and equipment to the island is not addressed. Apparently nobody on the island batted an eye about his activities; Shelley says nothing about it. One would think that a spot of grave-robbing would not pass unnoticed in a small and close-knit community, but Shelley does not think this worthy of consideration. There’s room for a great farce depicting this episode (“Oh, another mad scientist on today’s ship? What’s this one up to?”), but Frankenstein is never intentionally funny. The island interlude is capped off by Frankenstein running before a storm in a one-man boat. The storm blows him, in one night as I read the text, to Ireland. More than 400 miles from Orkney.

There are as many implausibilities of character: nobody in this novel has volition except for Victor and the creature. The whole family that the creature observes in their cottage is unlikely in the extreme. There’s a level of slasher-movie stupidity when Victor leaves his new bride alone, even though he knows that the creature has vowed to be present on Victor’s wedding novel. Shelley has told readers numerous times how brilliant Frankenstein is, yet he fails to take the most elementary precautions.

The prose is, I think, typical for fiction of the early 19th century, and not to my taste at all. It’s the epitome of tell-don’t-show, and veers from distant to tedious. There are half a dozen or more instances where characters say that words are inadequate for what they are feeling, or seeing, or trying to describe. If words won’t do, why have a novel at all? Maybe the characters could get their point across better with music, or interpretative dance, or, I dunno, architecture. Anyway. Frankenstein is a foundational text of science fiction, the headwaters for many of its currents, but frankly I’d just as soon leave it to the historians.

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Doreen was also exasperated by this work, though she wrote about different aggravations. She found more of interest in The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White.