For readers, the name of Victor Frankenstein is that of a mad scientist who created a monster, an undead horror unleashed on the world. But what if Frankenstein was simply a brilliant young idealist in a time of social and political upheaval and the soul-grinding Industrial Revolution? A poetic soul as well as a lover of knowledge, an experimenter who wished to unlock the secrets of nature through that greatest of discoveries, electricity? Such a tortured young man would certainly be closer to the original inventor depicted in “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus,’’ the creation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. And it is such a Frankenstein that Whitbread- and Maugham-prize winning British author Peter Ackroyd raises once again into chilling life.
British novelist reimagines Victor Frankenstein
Ackroyd, who turned the last days of Oscar Wilde into literary fiction and has published biographies on everyone and everything from Shakespeare to the River Thames, takes on classic horror with a vengeance in “The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein.’’
His project isn’t original; this literally wonderful novel is only the latest in a long line of pastiches as writers from Theodore Roszak (“The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein’’) to the poet Laurie Sheck (“A Monster’s Notes’’) have used the classic horror tale to reopen arguments on identity and the soul. But despite its literary precedents and Ackroyd’s own history as a scholar, this new novel is not so much a philosophical treatise as a rousing page turner. From its opening, with Victor looking back on his Swiss youth, to its last, gasp-inducing page, Ackroyd has imbued his book with enough “electrical fluid’’ to animate a corpse.
In prose rich enough to suggest the Gothic origins of the original without going overboard, this new novel tells of the young scholar as he leaves his native Geneva for Oxford to further his studies. A reserved but brilliant youth, Victor is soon caught up in the turbulent company of other daring young thinkers, interacting with such real figures as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a young Mary Wollstonecraft herself. These blossoming Romantics - atheists, poets, and outcasts - don’t lead the young Victor into a life of evil. The conventional Swiss youth is already half pagan, a believer in the “power and grandeur of nature.’’ But his exposure to Shelley’s revolutionary crowd sparks his desire for knowledge at all costs, and in rapid fashion a series of personal tragedies combines with his growing genius to create what may be either his greatest triumph or his downfall. That is, for those willing to take Victor at his own words.