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A review by chhknight
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
3.0
Long story short, the book is something very different from the Boris Karloff movie and the decades of green-skinned, flat-topped caricatures that followed. I went in expecting a monster story and I suppose I got that, but it turned out the monster was the scientist, or his ambition, or maybe technological development or something.
I appreciated a lot about this book. Shelley described sentiment with the kind of color and complexity usually applied to the physical world. I love reading male characters written by women -- they tend to have more realistic inner lives than when men write men nowadays, in my experience. One layer of narrator describes his longing for companionship like this:
“I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend” (2). Shelley’s gift for metaphor makes the text read like a philosophical treatise, and not at all like a 21st-century novel, let alone “horror.” Contemporary authors would throw in more jump scares and red herrings to keep the reader engaged.
Shelley is committed to her romantic project, though, and dwells on anguish, regret and vengeance more than, say, plot. She knew how to turn a phrase though. The monster, who seems to just grunt and squash villagers in later incarnations, accuses his creator with this evocative picture: “You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the fall” (107).
Subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” Shelley's story seems so focused on its moral that it fails, at times, to just be an entertaining story. I don't remember enough from college about Gothic literature to know if that's typical or not -- perhaps that wasn’t so much Shelley’s intent as was a psychological exploration; in her introduction she says she set out to write a “ghost story.” But it makes me appreciate the real artistry required in refreshing the same old monster tales archetyped by writers like her. I've often had the experience of reading a well-known historical document for the first time and being left a little disappointed by it as a piece of writing after centuries of hype. That's not Shelley's fault. But it makes me a little less likely to believe in “old masters” or “Great Men (sic)” in art and history. And I was already pretty suspicious.
I appreciated a lot about this book. Shelley described sentiment with the kind of color and complexity usually applied to the physical world. I love reading male characters written by women -- they tend to have more realistic inner lives than when men write men nowadays, in my experience. One layer of narrator describes his longing for companionship like this:
“I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend” (2). Shelley’s gift for metaphor makes the text read like a philosophical treatise, and not at all like a 21st-century novel, let alone “horror.” Contemporary authors would throw in more jump scares and red herrings to keep the reader engaged.
Shelley is committed to her romantic project, though, and dwells on anguish, regret and vengeance more than, say, plot. She knew how to turn a phrase though. The monster, who seems to just grunt and squash villagers in later incarnations, accuses his creator with this evocative picture: “You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the fall” (107).
Subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” Shelley's story seems so focused on its moral that it fails, at times, to just be an entertaining story. I don't remember enough from college about Gothic literature to know if that's typical or not -- perhaps that wasn’t so much Shelley’s intent as was a psychological exploration; in her introduction she says she set out to write a “ghost story.” But it makes me appreciate the real artistry required in refreshing the same old monster tales archetyped by writers like her. I've often had the experience of reading a well-known historical document for the first time and being left a little disappointed by it as a piece of writing after centuries of hype. That's not Shelley's fault. But it makes me a little less likely to believe in “old masters” or “Great Men (sic)” in art and history. And I was already pretty suspicious.