the casebook of victor frankenstein by peter ackroyd

Back in England, he leaves Oxford, takes rooms in smart Jermyn Street and a lab in dodgy Limehouse, contacts the resurrection men and gets down to business. As it turns out (no surprises here), what might have been a distraction turns out to be a validation of his efforts Elizabeth's death strengthens his determination to find ways of prolonging life. No sooner has he started work than he's called away to his native Switzerland: his sister Elizabeth has fallen ill. His plan is to penetrate the 'deepest mysteries of creation' by electrifying corpses. Young Frankenstein, guided by Shelley, meets the radical Westbrook family (Shelley will soon marry the daughter, Harriet), chats with Humphrey Davy, and tracks down some resurrection men.

When the action moves to London, things improve a little - even though the smoky streets, shadowy corners and clattery cobblestones could just as easily have appeared in most of his previous books.

Inspired by their radical politics, atheism and intoxicatingly mixed interest in poetry and science, he becomes intent on 'exploring the secrets of Nature'.Īckroyd handles all this in a rapid style that is meant to seem deft but feels perfunctory: the scenes are neither quite plausibly real nor properly fictional. (Ackroyd never quite decides whether he's writing spoof Gothic, or standing in the wings shaking a thunder-sheet in all sincerity.) Different kinds of electric current start flowing when he arrives to study in Oxford, and falls in with Hogg and Shelley. Our narrator is Frankenstein himself, speaking in a characterless, generic 19th-century idiom, who begins his 'Casebook' by remembering his childhood in the Alps, where he 'exulted in storms'. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is probably the most feeble yet: it contains the semi-inventions of someone who has been writing the same book for much too long.Īnyone who knows their Romantic writers, and their Ackroyd, will be able to predict the plot. More recently - and not surprisingly, given the steadiness of his focus - they have risked becoming formulaic. At their best (and these come earliest in the series), the novels prove the value of imaginative truths, which they project on a teeming cityscape compounded of authentic details and magic geography. Wilde, Hawksmoor, Chatterton, Dr Dee, Milton and the Lambs have all had the treatment, usually in ways that allow Ackroyd to indulge his other great obsession: the recreation of period London. P eter Ackroyd has been rewriting literary history in his novels (as well as telling it straight in his biographies and other non-fiction books) for 20-odd years now.

The casebook of victor frankenstein by peter ackroyd