Frankenstein

Frankenstein is the most misread famous book in the language, and almost everything the popular image contains is absent from it.

There is no lightning. There is no laboratory, no assistant, no hunchback, no bolts, no villagers with torches, and no scene in which the creature is brought to life on a slab in a storm — Victor's method is withheld in a single deliberate sentence, because Shelley understood that the mechanism is not the subject and that describing it would date the book. There is no Igor. The creature is not an inarticulate brute; he is the most eloquent character in the novel, he teaches himself French by eavesdropping, and he reads Paradise Lost, Plutarch and Goethe before he kills anyone.

What there is instead is a nested structure of three narrators arguing about responsibility. Captain Walton's letters to his sister frame Victor's confession, which frames the creature's own account, which contains the De Lacey family's story. Each layer is told by someone with a reason to be believed, and the book never arbitrates. Victor's version makes the creature a fiend. The creature's version makes Victor a father who walked out of the room.

It is a horror novel about parenthood and the horror is abandonment

The creature's crime sheet is real: a child strangled, an innocent woman hanged for it, a friend murdered, a bride killed on her wedding night. But every one of them follows from the same event, which is that the only person in the world who owed him anything looked at him once and ran. His demand is modest and he states it plainly — a companion, and then exile. Victor agrees, builds her, and tears her apart while the creature watches through a window. The novel's position is that Victor has created a person and then insisted on treating him as a consequence.

The prose and the pace

It is a 1818 novel and reads like one: long sentences, heavy landscape, extended apostrophes to Nature, and a plot that is mostly travel and grief. The Arctic and the Alpine sequences are genuinely sublime. The De Lacey section in the middle is where modern readers tend to stall, and it is also where the book makes its argument.

Which edition to read

The 1818 first edition and the 1831 revision are different books. The 1831 text adds fate, divine warning and a Victor who is less culpable; the 1818 text is colder, stranger and holds Victor responsible. Read 1818.

For the same creator destroyed by what he made, The Fly and Re-Animator; for the Victorian novel that answered it with a monster who is simply evil, Dracula.

The short answer: after the creature kills Elizabeth on their wedding night, Victor pursues him north for months, across Russia and onto the Arctic ice, and is picked up half-dead by Walton's ship. He tells Walton the whole story, urges him to destroy the creature if he can, and — in the novel's most important line — then partly retracts his warning against ambition, saying another man may yet succeed where he failed. Then he dies. That night the creature comes aboard and stands over the body. He does not gloat. He gives Walton an account of his own suffering, says that he is wretched beyond anything Victor endured, and tells him he intends to build a pyre and destroy himself. He climbs out through the cabin window onto an ice raft and is carried away into the dark. Whether he does it is never shown.

Who is the monster in Frankenstein?

The creature is unnamed throughout — Victor calls him fiend, daemon, wretch and devil, never a name — and Victor is the one called Frankenstein. The book is deliberately built so that both readings hold: the creature commits every murder, and Victor causes every murder. The symmetry is the argument. Shelley gives the creature the longer and better-reasoned speech, and gives Victor a dying retraction that undercuts his own moral.

How does Victor Frankenstein create the creature?

The novel will not say. Victor states that he discovered the cause of generation and life after two years of study at Ingolstadt, that he collected materials from charnel houses and dissecting rooms, that he worked for months in a solitary attic room, and that he will not disclose the method because the knowledge destroyed him. There is no electricity in the account and no description of the moment of animation beyond a dull yellow eye opening. The withholding is the book's single most imitated and least understood choice.

Does Victor make a female creature?

He begins one. The creature's bargain is explicit: make me a companion and we will both leave for South America and never be seen again. Victor travels to Orkney and works on her for months, then reconsiders — not out of mercy but because he fears the pair might breed a race — and destroys her in front of the creature, who is watching at the window. That is the moment the creature stops asking and promises to be with Victor on his wedding night.

Is the creature evil in Frankenstein?

Not in his own account, and the novel gives his account at length. He is born with no language and no understanding, learns both by watching a family through a chink in a wall, saves a drowning girl and is shot for it, and asks the blind De Lacey for friendship before the sighted members of the family drive him out. His first murder comes after a year of this. The book's structure makes him a person who was made into a monster, which is a different and worse proposition.

Is Frankenstein the first science fiction novel?

It has the strongest claim. The horror comes from a procedure rather than a curse: no devil, no supernatural agency, no divine punishment that the text confirms. Victor's transgression is methodological, he is a student of chemistry and anatomy, and the creature is the result of an experiment that worked. Brian Aldiss's argument for it as the origin of the form rests on exactly that.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Era bias 002 is as analog as our scale goes — 102 works read more modern. It is the oldest work we hold, written by hand in 1816 and published in 1818.

Tone 014 is bleak — 30 works score lower. Every member of Victor's family dies, the innocent are hanged for his omissions, and both the creator and the creature end in the Arctic intending to die.

The threat at 058 leans human — 76 works score lower. The creature is a made being with no supernatural power: he is strong, fast and cold-resistant, and everything he does is physically possible.

Viscera 030 is low — 30 works score lower. A strangling, a hanging, a dismembered unfinished body, and the charnel-house sourcing described in general terms.

Pace 018 is very slow — only 18 works are slower. Hundreds of pages are travel, correspondence and grief.

Reality anchor 050 is exactly the midpoint. Nothing in it violates physics as Shelley understood physics, and the method is never specified.

On shocks: almost none. The novel has no interest in startling and its most famous image — the eye opening — lasts one clause.