This only emphasizes that Mary Shelley’s monster is, above all, completely created rather than merely re-animated. The actual details of its construction and vivification are left cloudy (there is no mention even of galvanic electricity, let alone a brain, in Shelley’s account – only unspecified chemical apparatus).
Ackryod’s monster is utterly different. His is a single, re-animated corpse. Very specifically, it is the corpse of a Cockney medical student with a passion for Shakespeare, who dies of TB and is called Jack Keat — apparently no relation to Keats; yet when Frankenstein experiments with galvanizing his own hand, it transcribes quotations from a better-known Cockney medical student who also dies of TB. (As an atmospheric sci-fi ghost story on the same topic to knock the spots off this, I recommend Wireless by Rudyard Kipling.)
The actual resurrection of the monster, frizzled to life in Ackroyd’s version, is terrific. It is also thoroughly modern, with all the vivid specificity demanded by CGI effects. Its ‘lustrous black hair’ is micro-waved to a rather camp ‘ghastly yellow’; its ‘brilliantly white teeth’ are now all the more startling in its blackened mouth. But the crucial question of why and in what way this strangely baked creature is no longer Jack Keat is never properly addressed.
Perhaps — and I do normally dislike a book that forces me into explicit hypothesis — this novel is partly about the ambiguous resurrections of biography. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is certainly ambiguously autobiographical. Harriet Westbrook, Shelley’s first wife, is depicted slaving as a teenager in a spice factory, since her father believes that the female is ‘inferior to the male’ and therefore deserving of no education. Shelley certainly claimed, just as Ackroyd quotes, that Harriet’s father ‘persecuted her in a most horrible way’; however, ghastly as it might seem to a 16-year-old, Mr Westbrook’s middle-class ‘persecution’ actually consisted of urging that Harriet should continue her education in a school in Clapham.
Does this matter? Ackroyd’s novel, like Shelley’s, is rife with intriguing questions. But while Shelley wrestles with mighty notions of good and evil, and questions the responsibilities of a creator (or the Creator), Ackroyd’s novel is trapped in a world of unreliable narration and self-reference, which even includes Ackroyd’s own previous literary creation, the Limehouse golem. The neat dénouement of The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is properly shocking, but not at all unexpected. The ending of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not at all neat, but, like the novel itself, is wild, flawed and magnificently strange.
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