Dutiful Reading.

I’ve finished reading Frankenstein now. I’m glad I’ve done so, because it means I stuck to my guns and finished what I started. It also means I won’t have to continue reading it tomorrow. So what to make of it?

It is conjectured, I know, that Frankenstein is an allegory alluding to the dangers of playing God with science. Well, anybody in search of allegories can find them wherever they want to, just as easily as they can spot Jesus’s face in the bumps on a potato. Who can know whether Mary Shelley intended it that way? Maybe she did, but if she did, I’m afraid she executed it badly.

As I said in an earlier post, an allegory has first to work as a plausible story, and Frankenstein is so short on plausibility of both character and plot that the whole thing is risible. If, as one critic of Wuthering Heights avers, Heathcliff is a Byronic sham, then Victor Frankenstein is an utter Byronic shambles. He’s given to such outlandishly melodramatic speech and behaviour, and so lacking in the further reaches of fundamental reason, that it’s impossible to take him seriously. In fact, the only one of the main characters who argues his case convincingly is the Creature, and even that’s implausible given the source from which he learns his linguistic skills.

As for the plot, rarely a page goes by which fails to encourage a sense of incredulity at the sheer lack of thought given to it by the author. At the end, for example, Victor has died on Walton’s ship, and the Creature tells Walton that he is going to head for the furthest reaches of the North Pole, there to build a large fire and cast himself onto it. He jumps off the ship and onto an ice floe heading north, taking with him nothing but the clothes he stands up in. He fails to explain where he’s going to find the materials to make such a bonfire at the Pole, or what means he has to light it. The book is loaded with such ludicrous lapses.

My first thought on reaching the end was to cast the book onto my own living room fire, but I didn’t. Burning books is something I don’t do, not even bad ones. I expect I’ll just put it away somewhere and forget about it. I did my duty.

Swanky Gloves and Silly Stories.

When the outside temperature drops as low as -5° Celsius, I take it as adequate cue to don my seriously good gloves when I go out for the night walk. Tonight being forecast to drop rather lower than minus five, on went the gloves.

All my life I’d wanted a pair of seriously good gloves, and last winter I finally laid out the money and bought the most expensive pair the shop had in stock. They’re heavy and thick, like boxing gloves with fingers. They have a fleece lining as well as the body insulation, and they have lots of fancy buckles and straps, the exact purpose of which eludes me but they look good. Best of all, they’re black, with the maker’s logo – White Rock – embossed in red. In short, they’re a pretty swanky pair of gloves. I assume they’re pukka skiers’ gloves, and skiers are a swanky bunch, aren’t they? They drive Volvos.

I did think of dropping into the pub, just to swank with my swanky gloves, but thought better of it. The good burghers would have looked at my dirty wellies, my raggedy work jeans, my winter coat that’s falling apart at the seams (it really is literally falling apart at the seams) and my tatty old woolly hat, and then declared:

‘There is incongruity afoot here. The gloves do not match this ill-attired peasant. He must have stolen them from a rich person’s Volvo. Seize him!’

People have been accused, tried and convicted on flimsier evidence than that.

I might have been summarily suspended by the neck from the nearest tree. At very least I would have been taken before the magistrate and condemned to having my autumn years spent in ignominious incarceration.

I gave the pub a wide berth.

*  *  *

If you think that’s implausible, you should read Frankenstein. It gets sillier and sillier by the page. It reminds me of a story I wrote when I was nine, the denouement of which revolved upon the unlikely incidence of a match falling from somebody’s pocket and striking, thus setting a fire which razed the witches’ house to the ground. Frankenstein is becoming that bad. It lends itself to the gnawing suspicion that it was written by an immature nine-year-old with no clue as to how things work, but with a skill for writing impeccable but stodgy and turgid English. I’m reading it now for two reasons:

1) I like to finish what I start.

2) The sheer implausibility of it all is becoming an amusement in itself.

Fudging Frankenstein.

However much a story is meant to be an allegory, it still needs to make sense as a story, right? Well, there’s an awful lot in the story of Frankenstein that’s irrational or implausible. Most of it I’ve tried to ignore, but this is the big one:

Victor’s narrative never says how he actually made the creature. I was assuming he’d put random bits of cadavers together, partly because the films take that route, and partly because there was early reference to scouring graveyards and charnel houses for bodies. But he never actually says that’s how it was done. And maybe it wasn’t.

Mr C has now prevailed upon V to make him a mate and threatened dire consequences if he doesn’t comply, so that’s what V is currently engaged in. And where’s he gone to make the second creature? To a small, remote island in the Orkneys which only has three shacks on it, one of which V has rented to do the job. And all he has with him is his laboratory equipment. And there’s no mention of graveyards this time.

Hmmm… I suspect that Mary has glossed over a pretty important element here, but time will tell. Reading on.

Mary's Ideal Man?

Frankenstein’s ‘creature’ is a most interesting character. Compared with the average man, he’s bigger, faster, stronger, fitter, more agile, and tolerates a much higher range of heat and cold. In cerebral terms, he’s high-minded, compassionate, emotional and highly intelligent. On the downside, rejection can turn his emotional nature dark and provoke acts of obscene and irrational vengeance.

Notwithstanding the occasional severe lapse, however, he’s a veritable demi-god compared with the wretch Victor Frankenstein. And most interestingly of all, he’s vegetarian (quote: ‘I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.’)

This must say a lot about his real creator, Mary Shelley, mustn’t it? It must.

Being a Martyr to Victor's Misery.

I haven’t said much about Frankenstein yet, have I? OK, let me say a few words now before I wash the dishes and go for a walk.

Frankenstein is a first person narration by Victor himself, told to the owner of the ship which has just rescued him from the Arctic ice. The first thing we get is a long exposition of him telling his audience how miserable he is, and then he begins the story.

Well, I’m about a third of the way into the main narrative, and I would say that approximately 80-90% of it so far consists of Victor telling us how miserable he is. Just occasionally we get a bit of action – two fleeting glimpses of the creature, the murder of his kid brother, and dear Justine being wrongfully executed for the crime. The rest is page upon page upon page of Victor telling us how miserable he is. Occasionally he tells us how miserable somebody else is, but never tires of concluding the account by telling us that the other person is not as miserable as he is. In fact, he labours unceasingly to ensure that we are left in no doubt that nobody in the whole wide world holds a candle to Victor Frankenstein in the Being Miserable stakes.

Frankly, this is undoubtedly the dreariest novel I’ve ever read. The only good thing I can say about Mary Shelley is that she’s endlessly inventive in finding different combinations of words to say the same thing over and over and over again:

‘I’m the most miserable person who has ever lived. It’s a shame for me, isn’t it?’

And in so doing, she probably enjoys the distinction of having created the whingiest character ever to have found its way onto the printed page.

I still intend to finish it. I'm hoping that Victor will prove to have a second dimension.

Dishes.

Frankenstein.

In case anybody has been wondering, I haven’t been giving a running commentary on Frankenstein because it simply isn’t engaging me. So far the writing style has been correct, but dense and lacking any hint of lyricism; the two male narrators are a long way from being masculine as I understand the term, and I find myself quite unable to take them seriously; and there’s a self-conscious glumness about it all that I find drearily un-tragic.

I intend to finish it; maybe it will pick up when I get to the creature stage. At the moment, though, I’m reading it purely out of a sense of duty and not with any sort of pleasure.