Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

I wasn't expecting to like this book anywhere near as much as I ended up doing! The story as told in the book is much more interesting than the limited image of it that's got in to popular culture, and this was my first encounter with the whole thing. It's so much more about deeply flawed Victor Frankenstein (TLDR: our reading group kept using the term "main character syndrome") than about the mad science process. And while the creature is far from likeable, his portrayal has genuine pathos, even though most of what we hear about him is secondhand through the recounting of someone who hates him.

There are several impressively strong resonances to the modern world, between the general lack of ethics in tech and the current wave of "AI" hype. And of course big self-centred men who think that extreme success in one sphere gives them licence to behave as badly as they like in others.

I read a good biography of Mary Shelley back in April, but had never actually gotten around to reading her famous novel, Frankenstein, until now. I spotted it on a campsite book exchange and thought it really was about time! Frankenstein is such a cultural icon that I assumed I already knew the basic storyline, but it turned out that much of what I thought I knew isn't actually in the novel at all! And much of the novel is far deeper in ideas and tone than many of its recreations would have us believe.

Beginning with letters back home from an arctic explorer, Walton, we learn of his scientific intentions and of his bizarre meeting with a lone man stranded on an ice floe. That lone man is Victor Frankenstein, an obsessive Swiss scientist who had created and animated a monstrous man, but terrified by his creation, had immediately abandoned it. I really didn't like Victor at all. Not only is there his obvious and total lack of responsibility for his own actions and creation, but his incessant 'woe is me' whinging is infuriating. Even as his friends and family start dying off around him, he is still unable to find a backbone!

By contrast, our third narrator, the unnamed monster himself, is surprisingly erudite and eloquent for, essentially, a self-educated vagabond. Of course we only have his own words to support his claim of a kind and gentle disposition prior to the commencement of his murderous spree, but his story of being turned against humanity by people repeatedly recoiling from or even attacking him does ring depressingly true. For a book written practically two hundred years ago, Frankenstein is still remarkably relevant. Denying a person understanding, respect and companionship simply on the basis of their appearance might well result in them becoming an enemy.

Frankenstein, the novel, is written in wonderfully pompous language which dates it but not in a negative way. I don't think I would have been so swept up in the story otherwise. For a violent tale, there is practically nothing graphically described (which I appreciated), but Shelley's build-up of tension and suspense is brilliantly done. She takes her times evoking every scene and landscape so I could always envisage exactly where the characters were. By modern standards, I did think those characters weren't as developed as they could have been. The monster actually comes across as the most human of all and Victor, moving from arrogance to vengeance, simply doesn't learn - I suspect that is the point.

Shelley is a lot like her mother. They both love characters who talk and talk and talk.

Honestly, I did not expect most of what happened in this book. Everyone "knows" the Frankenstein story: mad scientist raises the undead in a creepy laboratory in the mountains during a thunderstorm. It usually seems to end there. Some variations, Frankenstein actually makes a "female" version and, usually, the female doesn't want anything to do with its male counterpart.

However, I learned that Frankenstein is much more than that. It's a lot more gruesome and morbid than I thought it would be. I wouldn't really classify it as horrifying in any way. Honestly, I was a bit bored by many parts of it. I sympathized with Frankenstein's creation when he told his tale but it was still hard for me to picture him as anything but human.

I will say that I enjoyed the unreliable narrator device. I can't believe sitting down with someone while they recounted a story as long as this.

Overall, I'm glad I read it and got it out of the way but I didn't particularly like the book itself. I don't want to say "it was okay" AKA 2 stars because that implies there was something good about the book. Not to say there's anything bad but it just wasn't for me.


To many readers, who have perhaps known Frankenstein only at second hand, the original may well come as a surprise. When Mary Shelley began it, she was only eighteen, though she was already Shelley's mistress and Byron's friend. In her preface she explains how she and Shelley spent part of a wet summer with Byron in Switzerland, amusing themselves by reading and writing ghost stories. Her contribution was Frankenstein, a story about a student of natural philosophy who learns the secret of imparting life to a creature constructed from bones he has collected in charnel-houses. The story is not a study of the macabre, as such, but rather a study of how man uses his power, through science, to manipulate and pervert his own destiny, and this makes it a profoundly disturbing book.

First: The event on which this fiction is founded, has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.

Last: He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.