Book Review | Frankenstein

Went for a horror classic for this months book club and it’s a great time to read it.

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

The scientist Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with possessing the secrets of life, creates a new being from the bodies of the dead. But his creature is a twisted, gruesome parody of a man who, rejected for his monstrous appearance, sets out to destroy his maker.

Mary Shelley’s chilling Gothic tale, conceived after a nightmare in 1816 when she was only eighteen, became a modern myth. It is a disturbing and dramatic exploration of birth and death, creation and destruction, and one of the most iconic horror stories of all time.

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It has been a while since I have read a classic, I don’t usually gravitate toward them but this was a book club pick and it was definitely a good choice for the season.

What I didn’t realise is how very different this story is from its many portrayals. If you hear Frankenstein and suddenly imagine a castle with a slightly crazed doctor, running all sorts of machinery during a lightning storm, and then shouting “It’s alive!” as a hulking mass rises from a slab, then I am here to tell you that the original is nothing like that. I can see where some of those elements have come from but it is more of a parody of the original story.

I did struggle with it at first, it starts with letters between a man and his sister and because I had a rough idea of the story I couldn’t figure out what the relevance was for this. Eventually, it became clear but I did find it a hard introduction. Then we get to Victor Frankenstein’s story and I have to say I was totally absorbed, there was a depth of detail and I was very interested in how his studies brought him to the place where he first conceived the monster.

However, after his creation comes to life I found it difficult to get through the rest of his story. Before the monster, you can tell he thinks well of himself and has never had to struggle but it contributes well to the idea of him playing God, after the monster however he becomes the most egregiously annoying character. I did really have to force myself to stick with it and only because everyone had said that the monster’s story was so good.

Thankfully they were not wrong, the story the monster tells is fascinating, it drew me in once again and I almost couldn’t believe that I had been struggling with the book, as I found it hard to put down in this section. The language, the development of the character, everything about the monster I found captivating.

It’s also in this section that I started thinking about the morals of the story, and what it was trying to convey; nature vs nurture, the monster being a reflection of Frankenstein, just because we can doesn’t mean we should; and I feel like there are probably more things that I would pick up on if I were to read it again. 

Whilst I did struggle at a few parts in the book, mostly due to Frankenstein, overall, I appreciate how amazing this story is for its time. I loved the way the sentences are crafted with each word feeling like it had been thought carefully about. I also loved that I felt more sympathy for the monster even though he ends up doing terrible things, and although the ending could be seen as anticlimactic in a way I thought it was kind of fitting.