ReviewBook Description
When two nineteenth-century Oxford students–Victor Frankenstein, a severe researcher, and the poetical Percy Bysshe Shelley–form an improbable friendship, the result is a tour de strength that could only come from one of the world’s most accomplished and prolific authors.
This haunting and atmospheric novel opens with a heated discussion, as Shelley challenges the conventionally religious Frankenstein to consider his atheistic notions of creation and life. Afterward, these conceptions become an obsession for the young scientist. As Victor begins conducting anatomical experiments to reanimate the dead, he at basi uses corpses supplied by the coroner. But these specimens prove imperfect for Victor’s purposes. Moving his makeshift laboratory to a deserted pottery factory in Limehouse, he makes contact with the Doomsday men–the resurrectionists–whose grisly methods put Frankenstein in great danger as he works feverishly to fetch life to the terrifying creature that will bear his name for eternity.
Filled with literary lights of the day such as Bysshe Shelley, Godwin, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley herself, and penned in period-perfect prose, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is sure to become a classic of the twenty-first century.
<hr Peter Ackroyd on The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
It is of course plainly true that Frankenstein is a terrifi story, and I was eager to see if I could extend it in other directions. It is a myth and a history, an allegory and a nightmare. I wanted to see if it was possible to maintain all those elements in a re-interpretation of the firstborn text.
I had been principally impressed by Mary Shelley’s original, but I was eager to tease out numerous of her assumptions and themes.
I had always been fascinated in the Romantic motion of English poetry, in the early nineteenth century, and the story of Victor Frankenstein permitted me to explore all the possible significations of “romantic” in that context. This also meant that I could talk about the worship of electricity and new science in the period. But it also permitted me to introduce the “real” characters of Byron and others into the plot. I wanted to set the story in London, as a way of re-imagining and re-creating the nineteenth-century city. I also wanted to see if I could recreate the language and texture of the amount of time so that the reader would feel connected in an intimate way with a culture and civilization that have now disappeared.
In that I was mainly assisted by the fact that I wrote and staged a series on BBC Television, entitled The Romantics, which permitted me to suggest the lines of continuity amongst Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and of course Mary Shelley herself. All of these humans appear in the novel itself. I was likewise helped by the fact that in the course of filming I went to all of the websites that appear in the novel itself, peculiarly the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley had the introductory inspiration for her novel. We expended one night filming there, and on the balcony of the house I had an intimation of the novel I was in regards to to write.–Peter Ackroyd
From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Medical student Victor Frankenstein imbibes fellow student Bysshe Shelley’s faith in the perfectability of mankind and strives to give rise to a being of infinite benevolence in this recasting of Mary Shelley’s horror classic from Ackroyd (First Light). When Victor reanimates the body of acquaintance Jack Keat, he’s so horrified at the significations of his Promethean feat that he abandons his creation. Outraged, the Keat creature shadows Victor as an avenging doppelgänger, bringing misery and death to those dearest to him. Ackroyd laces his narrative intelligently with the Romantic ideals of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and deftly interweaves Victor’s fictional travails with events of the well-known 1816 meeting amongst the poets that inspired Mary to draft her landmark story. His hasty surprise ending may strike a heap of readers as a cheat, altho most will agree that his novel is a brilliant riff on ideas that have informed literary, horror and science fiction for closely two centuries. (Oct.)
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From School Library JournalAdult/High School—Ackroyd merges historical fiction with literary license to fabricate an substitute reality in which Victor Frankenstein is one of Percy Shelley’s schoolmates and close friends. In this retelling of the legend, Shelley is the one who firstborn gives Frankenstein the idea of creating a monster. Soon, both Frankenstein and the Monster are deeply entwined in the lives of the Shelleys and Lord Byron, getting the cause of a great deal of of the strange occurrences that take place in their lives, including the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s book. Ackroyd’s characters are intriguing, and his depiction of the time amount of time reveals careful research. This book is a arousing and attention holding blending of Shelley’s introductory novel, pulling occasional direct quotes from it, and a speculation in regards to the real-life persons who were involved in it is creation. This is an splendid choice for anybody who enjoys Gothic, historical, or substitute fiction.—Kelliann Bogan, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH
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— Or, a postmodern Prometheus
Rewriting a Classic