Book notes No. 41: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd

Another gorgeous day here in Carmine Superiore: lava-lake sunrise, followed by blue skies and warm, healing sunshine. Winter doesn't get any better than this.

But lately, the weather has been somewhat gothic. At night the narrow, empty lanes of Carmine have been adrift with misty ghosts, and the dark corners were dank with ghastly presences. By day, the woods have been haunted by silent, foggy spectres Victorian-London-style. As I tread the ancient pathways, I couldn't help glancing over my shoulder again and again. Could it be that I am being followed? An image arises in my mind: parchment skin, lank hair streaked yellow, dead shark eyes, tortured eyebrows, black-burned lips smiling a horrid rictus from ear to ear.


You can tell, can't you, that this 2008 retelling of the Frankenstein story has in the past few days reached out with icy fingers and terrified me out of my wits! 

In Ackroyd's new version of the story, Frankenstein is introduced into the society of the young Romantic poets as a real person. His experiments in galvanism and his raising of a young man dead of consumption (significantly named Jack Keat) are set alongside a fictionalised version of events in the lives of Shelley, Byron, and Mary Godwin (Shelley's second wife, and the author of the original Frankenstein story). 

The pace is lively - this is a real thriller. We move from Oxford to London to Marlow and then onwards to Geneva and Chamonix. The landscape is vivid: the Thames and its estuary, Lake Geneva, the Oxfordshire countryside, the squalid backstreets of London's East End, the gloom and danger of Limehouse. And the intellectual landscape is equally so. We are assailed with quotations from many of the great writers of the day, either quoted direct or as ideas and phrases embroidered into the story. 

Of course, Ackroyd is well-known as a writer on London, and on this period, and for his interest in the esoteric in the award-winning Hawksmoor, for example, or the lesser-known Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. His scholarship is widely acclaimed: London, the Biography and Thames, Sacred River being only two bestsellers on the long list of his works of non-fiction and biography. So the background - both in an historical and intellectual sense - cannot fail to be rich and deft. 

And of course, Ackroyd being Ackroyd there is a certain amount of self-irony, which is always enjoyable: "I had long suspected that the English, despite their air of business and practicality, were a wholly credulous and superstitious nation. Why else do they love the tales of horror, as they call them?" English or not, if you "love the tales of horror", have an interest in the Romantic poets, 18th-century scientific endeavour, and electrifying endings (excuse pun), you'll love this story. 

But be warned. You'll be sleeping with the light on for weeks to come...



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