Book Review: Frankenstein (Or the Modern Prometheus)

*  *  *

I would say it's probably a safe guess that most people have heard of Frankenstein.  Or at least, Frankenstein's Monster.  He's only one of the top most famous literary monsters in history.

But the true monster of the novel is not the  monster we're all accustomed to seeing in the monster movies.  This becomes almost immediately apparent in Mary Shelly's original and brilliant novel, Frankenstein (Or the Modern Prometheus)

Frankenstein is one of those books that made me wonder, why haven't I read this before?  It's one of the best books I've ever read.  Of course, it's hard to replace Mr. Tolkien's works in my heart, but Frankenstein up near the top of the list for me.  

The story opens with letters written by a Captain Robert Walton, an explorer in the Antarctic, to his beloved sister back home.  Walton is possessed of a passionate thirst for discovery, and this desire has pushed him beyond whatever obstacles have plagued him until he finds himself stranded in the ice.  He is faced with the choice of pushing onward, or turning back.  But in the midst of his own drama, he witnesses two mysterious men pass nearby his ship on dog-drawn sleds, one pursuing the other.

When one of the men collapses, Walton brings him into the ship and there attempts to nurse him back to health.  The man, Victor Frankenstein, begins to forge a close friendship with the captain, and relates his sorry tale, which then leads us into the main story.

We are taken through a detailed account of  Victor's childhood, which at first seems like a simple sentimental backstory for our protagonist, but trust, me, almost every detail of this backstory becomes important later on in the story.

As a young man, Victor is influenced by his intent and passionate personality, his desire to learn and experiment with God's creation, and by the outdated science books he reads without knowing how flawed they are.  His early wondering soon flower into a solid idea once he reaches college, and he begins his quest to accomplish the impossible- to create life using the mysterious scientific process he has discovered.

After two years of obsessive labor that takes him to increasingly darker places, Victor is finally successful in building his 'perfect being', which he designs to be beautiful.  But as soon as the creature awakens, Victor is struck by the horror of what he has done.  He has gone against nature and God in one of the most blatant ways possible, and now he cannot take it back.  After a harrowing night spent hiding from his monstrous creation, Victory manages to elude it and finds it gone in the morning.  He believes his troubles and sins are safely buried... but soon finds that he cannot be so easily free from the dreadful crime he committed.  

This book, though technically a "horror" novel, does not read like one.  It's a slow burn from start to finish: and though the plot in itself is fairly predictable in this day and age, its mastery is in its prose, and the feelings that prose invokes in the reader.  Victor, the narrator, often waxes poetic on morality and philosophy, which makes this quite the  thought-provoking piece as the story progresses.

I think my favorite aspect of this novel is the characters.   They have a stasifying depth to them- even the Creature which Frankenstein creates.

Victor Frankenstin is a charming, likable young man with a loving, devoted family.  But his hubris, and his obsessive personality leads him down a road of self-destruction that he could have easily walked away from had he had the sense to look around him.  I got the sense that Victor may or may not have always been just a little bit insane, because of the way his mind works.  He's a strange fellow, but the reader comes to both love and despise him as the novel goes on.

As for the Creature (whom I came to think of as "Adam", since that's who Victor intended him to emulate), he was a surprisingly compelling character as well.  He is not the groaning, lumbering, Hulk-like beast as most movies tend to portray him.  No, the Creature quickly proves himself to be not only intelligent, but cunning.  His primary education, once he had taught himself to understand both language and reading, were Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Greeks, and Goethe's Sorrows of Werter.
  
He is strong and quick, even graceful.  He is intuitive to human nature, and once he becomes Victor's foe, sets out to systematically drive his creator mad with grief.  But before that, I as a reader had already come to greatly sympathize with the Creature, for when he first awakened into the world of the living, he had a childlike innocence that, if nurtured, could have shaped him into quite the heroic figure.

Furthermore, I was surprised when I read this book to find that the physical description of the Creature is completely different than the classic aesthetic with which we are familiar.  Far from the flat-headed green monster, Victor describes having built the Creature to be beautiful; limbs in perfect proportion, long luxurious black hair, perfect teeth, handsome face, etc... it's just the fact that the Creature has been instilled with an unnatural life that makes him ugly.  Granted, when the Creature finally blinks to life, his skin is grayish and shriveled, his lips black, and his eyes a disturbing dun-white... but aside from those things, what truly makes him vile is the fact that he was not ever mean to exist.

For this review, I can't think of enough cons to do my usual PROS and CONS section.  Victor's ambitions border on the blasphemous at times, but the point of the book is to show how wrong he was.  There are a few instances of God's name in dialogue, some of which are undoubtedly in vain- but many of them seemed to me as being actually spoken to God in a kind of plea.

If you're looking for a book that transports you to another time and place, that questions the roles of hero and villain, look no further than Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (Or the Modern Prometheus).  It's well worth the read... and another read... and another.

*  *  *

By the way, for any who have read the book and are frustrated with the fact that there are so many blatantly inaccurate adaptions, check out Hallmark's 2004 two-part mini series.  Of all the adaptions of this novel, that one is by far the most accurate.  It deviates from the book in several places, of course, but for the most part they got it right, though it being a film rather than a book, they had no means of delving into the moral and philosophical musings that characterize the original.  They get the Creature right (he stole the show!), and I very much approve of the casting for Victor and his friend, Henry Clerval.  

*  *  *

-Emmarayn Redding