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Overview
When two nineteenth-century Oxford students—Victor Frankenstein, a serious researcher, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—form an unlikely friendship, the result is a tour de force that could only come from one of the world's most accomplished and prolific authors.This haunting and atmospheric novel opens with a heated discussion, as Shelley challenges the conventionally religious Frankenstein to consider his atheistic notions of creation and life. Afterward, these concepts become an obsession for the young scientist. As Victor begins conducting anatomical experiments to reanimate the dead, he at first uses corpses supplied by the coroner. But these specimens prove imperfect for Victor's purposes. Moving his makeshift laboratory to a deserted pottery factory in Limehouse, he makes contact with the Doomsday men—the resurrectionists—whose grisly methods put Frankenstein in great danger as he works feverishly to bring life to the terrifying creature that will bear his name for eternity.
Filled with literary lights of the day such as Bysshe Shelley, Godwin, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley herself, and penned in period-perfect prose, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is sure to become a classic of the twenty-first century.
Synopsis
A New York Times Notable Book and Providence Journal Best Book of the Year
From the incomparable Peter Ackroyd: a brilliant re-imagination of the classic tale that has enthralled readers for nearly two centuries.
Victor Frankenstein, a researcher, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley form an unlikely friendship as first-years at Oxford. Shelley challenges the conventionally religious Frankenstein to consider his atheistic notions of creation and life—concepts that become an obsession for the young scientist. As Victor begins conducting anatomical experiments to reanimate the dead, he at first uses corpses supplied by the coroner. But these specimens prove imperfect for Victor’s purposes…
Filled with the literary lights of the day, including Percy Shelley, Godwin, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley herself, and penned in period-perfect voice, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is sure to become a classic of the twenty-first century.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, written when the author was 19 and published in 1818, was so ponderous a departure from traditional Victorian fare that it shocked not just the nerves but also the sensibilities of staid British society. The outrageous tale of a monster sprung from inanimate matter -- and capable of quoting Milton and Goethe -- who then turns against his creator, heralded a brave new voice.
Editorials
Terrence Rafferty
…Ackroyd does the Frankenstein mythology a tremendous service by restoring its intellectual weight, its emotional gravitas, its air of tragic idealism…The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is an entertaining and bracingly intelligent yarn—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Medical student Victor Frankenstein imbibes fellow student “Bysshe” Shelley's belief in “the perfectability of mankind” and strives “to create a being of infinite benevolence” in this recasting of Mary Shelley's horror classic from Ackroyd (First Light). When Victor reanimates the body of acquaintance Jack Keat, he's so horrified at the implications of his Promethean feat that he abandons his creation. Outraged, the Keat creature shadows Victor as an avenging doppelgänger, bringing misery and death to those dearest to him. Ackroyd laces his narrative intelligently with the Romantic ideals of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and deftly interweaves Victor's fictional travails with events of the well-known 1816 meeting between the poets that inspired Mary to draft her landmark story. His hasty surprise ending may strike some readers as a cheat, though most will agree that his novel is a brilliant riff on ideas that have informed literary, horror and science fiction for nearly two centuries. (Oct.)Library Journal
In Ackroyd's new page-turner, readers are taken on a heart-stopping journey through early 19th-century England, where, at Oxford, a young Victor Frankenstein is befriended by budding poet/atheist Shelley. Both men must experiment—Shelley with his revolutionary lyrics and ideas and Frankenstein with theories about the creation of life from electricity. Writing in beautiful prose with a voice appropriate to the era, Ackroyd allows Frankenstein to narrate the tale of his experiment gone horrendously awry. As the body count mounts, Frankenstein tries to undo his work, all the while mingling with the likes of Lord Byron, Shelley's wives, and other notables. And when the reader comes to the end of the novel, the question remains: was there actually a monster, or was it all a function of the creator's dementia? VERDICT Noted novelist/biographer Ackroyd specializes in speculative novels (e.g., Chatterton) in which historical figures, supernatural beings, and madmen mingle together on the streets of London. As in Laurie Sheck's recent A Monster's Notes, the reader is here encouraged to sympathize with the monster. Essential for Ackroyd fans and readers who can't get enough of Frankenstein's monster. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/09.]—Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib. Overland Park, KSSchool Library Journal
Adult/High School—Ackroyd merges historical fiction with literary license to create an alternative reality in which Victor Frankenstein is one of Percy Shelley's schoolmates and close friends. In this retelling of the legend, Shelley is the one who first gives Frankenstein the idea of creating a monster. Soon, both Frankenstein and the Monster are deeply entwined in the lives of the Shelleys and Lord Byron, becoming the cause of many of the strange occurrences that take place in their lives, including the inspiration for Mary Shelley's book. Ackroyd's characters are intriguing, and his depiction of the time period reveals careful research. This book is a fascinating blending of Shelley's original novel, pulling occasional direct quotes from it, and a speculation about the real-life people who were involved in its creation. This is an excellent choice for anyone who enjoys Gothic, historical, or alternative fiction.—Kelliann Bogan, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NHKirkus Reviews
Prolific literary polymath Ackroyd (Poe, 2009, etc.) rearranges the original gothic horror story of ambition gone awry into a blend of autobiography and history. Mary Shelley is herself a character in this recasting of her novel; she's one of several real-life figures whose paths cross that of the ambitious, privileged Swiss seeker attracted to all that is new and radical. Victor Frankenstein finds an ally in fellow Oxford student Percy Bysshe Shelley, a passionate atheist who shares his ideas of a new, fairer society of men uncoupled from divine creation. Consumed with curiosity about "the spirit of life," Frankenstein experiments on the dead using electricity to reinvigorate them, seeking to create a human unencumbered by class, society or faith. Obtaining his bodies from grave robbers, he eventually succeeds in reanimating a very fresh young corpse, endowing it with enormous strength in the process, but also horribly changing its appearance. The monster learns it is an object of disgust to other humans and begs its creator for a companion, but Frankenstein, now horror-stricken by his achievement, refuses. Having already killed Shelley's first wife, the monster promises misery to its maker as part of their indissoluble bond. Bizarrely, Victor joins Byron, Shelley, Mary and Dr. Polidori for the Villa Diodati sojourn at which his own story is born, but in this version the conclusion lies back in London, different and dubious. A questionable mishmash of cultural, scientific, literary, psychological and political material gives birth to an atmospheric but unnatural doppelganger to Shelley's classic.The Barnes & Noble Review
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, written when the author was 19 and published in 1818, was so ponderous a departure from traditional Victorian fare that it shocked not just the nerves but also the sensibilities of staid British society. The outrageous tale of a monster sprung from inanimate matter -- and capable of quoting Milton and Goethe -- who then turns against his creator, heralded a brave new voice.From there to the 1931 cinematic adaptation by James Whale, in which a menacing, unforgettable simulacrum of our nightmares is brought to haunting life by Boris Karloff, Frankenstein has, through the ages, plumbed the familiar God-versus-science divide to argue against technology ruining our best instincts.
It's a classic tale, not to be lightly meddled with, so when the prospect of a revision -- for why else would anyone adapt it -- presented itself, I was less than enthused. Rewritings of classic novels are always a fraught business. The only reason one can justify their presence is to let us in on the story from a new perspective, a voice hitherto silenced.
It is strange, then, that Peter Ackroyd, who has made an art of fictionalizing reality and dripping fiction in realism, re-imagines the original Modern Prometheus with nary a shift in perspective/voice. Barring a few modifications in plot, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is an almost straight lift of the Mary Shelley classic.
Following his penchant for interweaving diverse sources, Ackroyd introduces a host of real-life characters in the narrative: from Mary Shelley (née Godwin) herself to her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, here an enigmatic influence on Victor, the narrator and creator of the eponymous monster (indeed, "Frankenstein," popularly believed to be the monster's appellation, is actually the name of its creator). Then there are Lord Byron and his physician, Dr. Polidori.
Victor, pushed forth by the heady dynamism of youth, arrives at Oxford from Ingolstadt in Germany to indulge his lifelong passion for the wondrous "force instilled within the most minute organisms, making them move and meet." A closet poet, Victor can verbalize from memory poems of high complexity. An admirer of Bysshe (as Percy Shelley is called here), Victor becomes friends with the atheist poet.
Their easy companionship is tested when Bysshe is asked to leave Oxford for his "strange ideas" and "libertarian activities." He returns to London, and in his wake, follows Victor. This is the point where the novel picks up, and we see 19th-century London through Ackroyd's eyes -- as much the poverty and squalor of the slums as the glamor and stimulation of the arts scene.
London is also where the first dark shadows of Victor's passion find support. Like in the original, he is intent on studying the effects of galvanism on the body's electric fluid in his drive to create a better and nobler man. And the sprawling metropolis provides him just the inspiration. The resurrectionists supply him cadavers ("nice and fresh") for his experiments and he attends lectures by physicists that bolster his beliefs. Finally, he gets himself a run-down warehouse by the Thames and begins his experimenting in earnest.
The Casebook is largely true to Mary's original except in the details of the monster. Here the creature is a brought-to-life corpse, a medical student called Jack Keat, who died of tuberculosis. While there is apparently no relation to the John Keats who also died of tuberculosis and whose spirit, if reawakened, can be expected to haunt the boulevards of Moorgate, Ackroyd does make his monster sufficiently literary to quote at random from Shakespeare.
Besides, Ackroyd's monster, seeking to avenge his pendulous life-versus-death state, does not murder his master's wife, since there is none in this version. Rather, his furydirects itself atvictims far removed.
It is a mark of Ackroyd's masterly research that he is able to mingle real-life events with the narrative without compromising the story. When Victor first arrives in London, he comes across one Harriet Westbrook, a young girl found slogging in a spice factory, because her father has very definite notions of how girls ought to be raised. Bysshe, all a-glitter with his idealism, takes it upon himself to rescue her. He promises her father to pay for Harriet's education and later marries her (Harriet was really Bysshe's wife before Mary). All this would be of little relevance to Victor's monster, but for the fact that Harriet, who committed suicide at the Serpentine in actual truth, becomes the monster's first victim -- also at the Serpentine. The crime being murder in his retelling, Ackroyd sends Harriet's brother to the gallows.
The scene then shifts toMarlow where the famed trio -- Byron,Bysshe, and Mary -- spend their days in an easy camaraderie until Victor too, in a bid to dodge his creation, lands there. Darkness beckons as the monster, in perpetual trail of his creator, arrivesjust as (in another curious mishmash of fiction and reality) Polidori, Byron's physician, finishes the first vampire story in English.
It is uncanny how Ackroyd brings together the dramatis personæ in this fashion -- an echo of Mary's assertion that her inspiration to write Frankenstein came after horror stories were exchanged on a stormy night she spent in the company of Byron, Bysshe, and Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Mary, in Ackroyd's version, is herself a possible victim, chancing upon a face in the window, "crumpled, creased...like a sheet of paper hastily thrown away," which vanishes after she screams, setting the stage for another brutal crime.
Given all that, however, there is a certain labored quality to the terror wreaked by the monster. The ballast of Mary Shelley's original, derived from our mortal fascination with -- as well as fear of -- eternal life, loses its sheen in retelling. Ackroyd's familiarity with the sights, sounds and smells of Victorian England allows him to burnish his tale suitably, but it is an ultimately stale cherry.
Even so, the ending manages to spring a genuine surprise, and it is here that we can locate the true fruits of Ackroyd's seemingly unrewarding efforts. The idea of eternal life, so shocking two centuries ago, is, thanks to scientific advances, more acceptable today. Yet, the fate visited upon Victor in the search of perfection is a reminder of what messing around with God, as that term may be understood in a postmodern, post-Dawkins sense, can entail. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, in the final analysis, is a cautionary tale to remind us that tampering with nature, no matter the nobility of the aims associated with it, can have widely unexpected and drastic consequences.
And, perhaps, that holds equally true for classic works of literature. --Vikram Johri
A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Vikram Johri is a former student of electronics engineering turned full-time writer. His reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the Christian Science Monitor, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chicago Sun-Times. He blogs at http://patrakaar2b.blogspot.com.