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Friday 5 December 2008

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Rekindling life in a dead frame

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, by Peter Ackroyd

Why re-write Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein? The rewriting of well-known novels generally depends upon two techniques. The first involves recasting the narrator: telling the tale from a different point of view, usually that of the historical underdog (women, servants, woodworm, etc). The second is to update the novel, reinventing it in modern dress.

Peter Ackroyd’s narrator, however, is exactly the same as Mary Shelley’s (give or take the now forgot framing device): Victor Frankenstein’s narration is interspersed, just as in the original, with long interludes from a monster endowed with preternatural Romantic magniloquence, though Ackroyd’s monster learned his English from Robinson Crusoe rather than Paradise Lost. And as for updating: Ackroyd’s novel is embedded even more specifically in the 19th-century than the Romantic original ever was.

Indeed, the central conceit of The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is that Victor Frankenstein leaves Ingoldstadt to study at Oxford University, where he becomes friends with the atheist poet, Shelley. He also meets Byron, Godwin, Polidori (Byron’s doctor, but also author of the first vampire story published in English), and both Shelley’s wives — Harriet Westbrook and Mary Godwin, the daughter of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women and the author of the original Frankenstein.

Ackroyd’s novel is, like its famous predecessor, immensely readable. It crackles with that peculiar mixture of ebullience and self-loathing that galvanises Ackroyd’s resurrection of the past. His ear for Romantic language is almost pitch-perfect, without ever becoming slavish (actually, it is Mary Shelley’s characters who talk like animated warming-pans — but one must remember that she, remarkably, was only 19 when she wrote her extraordinary novel).

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