I am glad I read The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein in December – a month in which ghost stories and other horrors form traditional fare for many whether on the page or on radio. The darkening afternoons and long nights provide a suitable backdrop for this alarming read which unlike most books on these themes convinces the reader that the things written of could have been possible. Well, almost convinces after slightly more of the suspension of belief which all fiction requires!
In Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd has written a novel of dark themes and emotional extremes, a classic Gothic drama, written with the intelligence and insight you would expect from Ackroyd, who also demonstrates once more his immense knowledge of 19th century London.
Doctor Victor Frankenstein is no longer a merely fictional character, but has become a friend and associate of Percy Byshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Mary Woolstonecraft. Arriving from Geneva to study at Oxford University, Frankenstein is a high-minded scientist who serious ly believes that it is possible to create a transformed mankind by bringing the new power of electricity to bear on living people – but he will first have to conduct his experiments on recently deceased corpses. The first half of the book describes Dr Frankensteins journey through his electrical experiments and on the way tells us much about how 19th century scientists viewed the natural world.
While working in London Frankenstein makes contact with three resurrection men; grave-robbers who proceed to procure fresh corpses for him to experiment on. Alas, his experiments require him to have ever fresher material to work on, and soon the resurrection men bring him a corpse which shows every sign of having been murdered in order to meet his demands.
One dark night, in his workshop on Limehouse marshes, Dr Frankenstein applies his electrical equipment to this new cadaver and the outcome exceeds his expectations – he seems to have raised the dead. Needless to say, this is not a joyous event and leads to a great deal of trouble for Frankenstein and also his friends. I won’t spoil the plot by going beyond saying that much carnage and blood-letting results form this act.
The novel is wonderfully atmospheric, with most of the action taking place in suitably dimly lit settings whether down by the Thames on foggy nights, or in gloomy inns, private houses and remote Swiss castles. Ackroyd writes a scene based on the real-life events of 1816 when the Shelley’s spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland.
In the novel, Frankenstein is also staying with the Shelleys and one dark night Shelley commands his friends, “on such a night as this we must amuse ourselves after dinner by telling stories of elves and demons. If there is a lightning storm so much the better”. Polidori proceeds to tell a story set in Whitby, a town where in fact Mary was later to set her own novel Frankenstein.
Peter Ackroyd’s immense knowledge of London’s history provides a fascinating counter-point to the story, and it is possible to look up the various locations and follow the trail of devastation that follows Frankenstein’s misguided experiments.
The book has a clever ending which one Amazon reviewer didn’t like and reduced his review from five star to four star because of it. I felt quite the opposite that the ending would warrant an additional star. I have read most of Peter Ackroyd’s books and as I would expect, Frankenstein follows his other books in being well-written and absorbing throughout.
