Monsterously good
The casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd. Chatto & Windus, £16.99
THE secret of Peter Ackroyd’s considerable success is that his biographies read like novels and his novels contain a wealth of historical facts and figures. Hence, his non-fiction volumes on Dickens, Blake and TS Eliot have great narrative sweep and psychological penetration. The novels about Hawksmoor and Dan Leno are crammed with fascinating information about ecclesiastical architecture and the traditions of the East End music hall.
His latest offering, The Casebook Of Victor Frankenstein, is another thrilling concoction that blurs the genres – a work of the imagination rooted in material verifiable in an encyclopaedia. We learn about elementary physics. Notes may be taken on anatomy and medicine. Written as if in the voice of the notorious baron, real people appear in Frankenstein’s life. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and the rest of the highly-strung Romantic gang are to the fore.
With trips now and again to the Lake District, the Essex Marshes and to the Swiss Alps we for the most part are in early 19th-century London. Topography, eating and drinking habits, soldiers’ uniforms, and the routines of Newgate Prison are described. The characters hold topical debates about liberty and enlightenment. Scientific discoveries are supplanting superstition and theological dogma – and the pushy Frankenstein “wished to know everything about the world and the great universe”.
To achieve this he attends Oxford University and the dissecting rooms at St Thomas Hospital. Gruesome scenes are depicted – the copper pans used for boiling bones, the stink of rotting flesh and embalming fluid that could be “detected upon our frock coats”. Vivisection is conducted upon cats, dogs and a monkey.
Frankenstein’s ambition – exactly chiming with that of the Romantic poets – is to conceive of the “new kind of man”, who’d be free from human limitations and prejudice, “unencumbered by class or society or faith”. Unfortunately, he takes this notion literally rather than philosophically and soon we are in the spooky lab in Limehouse where he can get on with his “secret and silent work far beyond the haunts of men”.
So as “to bring life to dead or dormant matter”, Frankenstein employs body snatchers, wittily known as Resurrectionists, who sell fresh cadavers to medical schools. “It is not a delicate trade, Mr Frankenstein!” Such a line would be perfect in one of those old Universal horror movies, starring Boris Karloff and sundry hunchbacks.
The lumbering monster is brought into being in the traditional ways, with lightning flashes and explosions emanating from expensive “engines and coils and jars”. We hear much about pioneering electrical batteries that are capable of “creating the vital spark”. Indeed, Ackroyd goes into such enthusiastic detail about electrical currents, circuits, conductors and condensers that readers could build their own apparatus, if desired, in their own homes.
AS USUAL, the creature is hideous to behold and “a most desolate and horrible shriek” emerges from its blackened mouth. Sensing nothing but hostility, he goes on the rampage, murdering Frankenstein’s loved ones, including Shelley’s first wife. “I am no slave,” he declaims, posing amongst the storms and torrents. “I am your master.”
Such is his vast strength, he can swim the length of the Thames under water. He swims all the way to Switzerland, too, coming up for air in Lake Geneva. Periodically he pops up unannounced, at a window or from behind a bush, to frighten the baron out of his wits. In this he achieves his aim, as Frankenstein ends the novel incarcerated in the Hoxton Mental Asylum For Incurables.
Shelley’s second wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, also among the cast, presumably goes off to write up her own classic version of events. Ackroyd’s telling of the tale is a worthy rival – I found his book so creepy I kept the bedroom light on all night.
