Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus 
Mary Shelley, 1818
Too many pp
Hard cover, free, public library
Various printers

Why review a classic for our inaugural issue? A couple of reasons. First, it’s Halloween and, though Frankenstein is a story you already know as cliche horror, you may not have read the original version. Secondly, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is important because it is one of those works we can point at and truly say, “This book created a new direction in fiction; it changed the world of writing.” Frankenstein is the primer coat for every reader of horror and science fiction because neither genre existed at the time Shelley wrote this, her first novel, so it really is a literary landmark.

But also, frankly, it really isn’t very good.

While Frankenstein has seminal elements of both horror and sci-fi, it is more a Gothic study of the emotional weakness of obsession, despair and hatred. Nearly all of the first person dialogue of Shelley’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, consists of conveying his obsessions, and it becomes tiring. He repeatedly lapses into flowery descriptions of his morose and despondent mental states, then ascends in euphoric edification of nature, and then follows that with another plummet into a suffocating miasma of self-centered emotional yuk. Of making his creature he says, “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” The critter escapes while he goes to bed for a few months with “the commencement of a nervous fever,” caused by neglecting his health in favor of obsessing with bringing a corpse to life.

After recovering, Victor ignores the consequences of his actions by taking a giddy hike. “When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations,” he says. “A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy.” You know what’s next: crash & burn. The creature kills the child, William, and Victor lets the nanny, Justine, get blamed for it because he doesn’t want anyone to know about the monster he let loose. He feels real bad, but instead of taking responsibility, Victor goes camping and revels in “imperial nature” again: “These sublime and magnificent scenes,” he says, “elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillised it...the unstained snowy mountaintop, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, the ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds - they all gathered around me and bade me be at peace.” Blah, blah, blah. Victor Frankenstein displays classic bipolar dysfunction; he’s a Prozac candidate on an emotional yo-yo.

First obsessed to create, Victor’s horrified revelation (obsessive, of course) at his now-dubious accomplishment plunges him into another debilitating physical and emotional collapse, after which he is consumed with an obsession to destroy his creature.

And, what about that creature? Shelley gives him some first-person time, too, and we find the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The nameless and physically repulsive used-to-be-dead guy, meeting only rejection from a cruel world, mimics Victor’s obsessiveness. Despairing of ever finding compassion, much less acceptance, he decides to avenge himself on Victor by destroying his creator’s sources of compassion - Victor’s family and friends. “I, too, can create desolation,” the creature exults upon murdering William. The best line in the book, the juxtaposed concepts of creation and destruction are a surreal illustration of the ease with which humans can rationalize any behavior under the intoxicant of obsession.

Back to Victor. I have sympathy for people who are sometimes overwhelmed by self-destructive emotions, but I don’t have any patience for those who choose it as a lifestyle. I came to fully despise Victor Frankenstein when he demonstrated a complete lack of cojones at Justine’s trial - not just because he let the innocent woman hang for his own mistakes, but because his own self-pity outweighed any sympathy for the victimized servant girl.

Throughout the book, Victor is seized by his passions and driven by his obsessions, and they eventually lead to his destruction, even as they destroy those around him. At the end, on an arctic  exploration vessel, he finally acknowledges his stupidity. “You seek for knowledge as I once did,” Victor tells an explorer, “and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.” But then, of course, he yo-yos back into obsession and denial, admonishing the crew not to retreat south from the encroaching ice that will crush its hull, telling them to “be more than men. Be steady to your purpose and firm as a rock.” By now, he’s absolutely looney tunes and the crew wisely disregards his advice. A few days later the peritonitic “why me?” gland in Victor’s head finally ruptures and he croaks at last, to the grateful relief of the reader.

The wearisome protagonist aside, Frankenstein’s  prose is too prosey, the dark emotions too darkly emotional. Though there’s infinite room to read allegory into the book (like the widely accepted idea that it is a sharp criticism of the Industrial Revolution, given the subtitle), the fact is that 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin wrote the basis for Frankenstein as a friendly competition. She was a guest at Lord Byron’s castle in 1816 (Percy Bysshe Shelley, her soon-to-be-husband, was also a guest there) when bad weather kept everyone indoors for a few days. To pass the time, the story goes, Lord Byron challenged his guests to write the scariest ghost story; Mary’s won, and she had her story at the printer’s by 1818. So much for incisive teenage allegory.

So, why bother reading Shelley’s book? Well, it actually does a have a cool twist at the end (can you say “sequel?”). You earn “Yeah, I’ve done that” credibility in your literary conversations. You experience the 200-year-old literary style birthing a new kind of fiction, the origin of a genre. Which genre that may be, horror or sci-fi, is for you to decide.

Frankenstein - or its concept, at least - remains popular, mostly due to movie adaptation, I suspect . When I Googled “Mary Shelley, Frankenstein,” it came back with more than two million hits. In researching sales of the title, I found there have been so many reprints that total book sales would be anybody’s guess. As an interesting sidebar, I learned that South Africa banned the book in 1955 as “indecent, objectionable or obscene.”

Hmm...well, it really wasn’t that bad.

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