2024 read #5: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.*

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley*

282 pages

Published 1818 (text from the 1831 edition)

Read from January 8 to January 10

Rating: 3 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I first read this book sometime in my tweens, maybe a year or so after I first read The War of the Worlds. My copy was one of those fifty cent paperbacks that Wal-Mart used to sell in the 1990s, the kind that you sometimes still find in used bookstores (though they try to charge three bucks for them now). Naturally, child me expected a big green monster with bolts on his neck, lurching around aggressively, arms outstretched. Instead, the book likely introduced me to the early modern practice of framing devices: it drops us into the letters of Captain Walton, laying out his quest for the North Pole, his childhood, etc., long before we meet the mysterious figure of Victor Frankenstein, who in turn regales us with his parents’ life stories long before he gets to his own. Still, when it came to books, I was an adaptable child, and Frankenstein quickly became a core memory.

Somewhere in the last year or so, I became fixated on the idea of rereading it, something I hadn’t yet done as an adult. Maybe it was when I added decade tags to my reviews here, and began searching for books to bulk up my early 19th century entries. I toyed with the idea of reading Frankenstein on Project Gutenberg, or even purchasing a copy. Thankfully, the library spared me from either of those extremes.

For its time, Frankenstein is remarkably fluent, and it remains an entertaining novel. It’s amusing how we spend 65 pages with Walton’s letters and with Victor’s childhood, and then in a matter of two pages we make the leap from “I discovered the secret of bestowing life” to “I’m gonna build an eight foot tall man.” The Being’s quickening immediately thereafter is anticlimactic, presented in a summary statement without any of its later cinematic beats (the lightning, the table, and so on). When the Being tells his story, you finally discover where many of the cinematic trappings come from — his early inability to speak, angry villagers, and so on.

It startled me to rediscover how much my younger self — quite likely autistic, very much abused, living in a car, studying humanity in hopes of joining it someday — identified with the Being’s observations of the De Lacey family in their cottage. I remember fantasizing about my hypothetical adult life in similar terms, approaching other humans for the first time:

I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour, and afterwards their love.

As you’d expect from a book this old, large parts of Frankenstein haven’t aged well. (“Fix me by building me a wife!” will never sit right in the age of incels.) But it retains an almost medieval grandeur of purpose in its examination of the cruelty of an imperfect creator, and it remains a solid and engrossing novel.