Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Welcome to winter.  Here is a book that chilled me to the bone when I first read it as child.  I remember I had a yellowed and  battered Pan paperback copy of the book, the cover missing and  the pages dog-earred by previous owners.  In the wee, small hours I read the following:

It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burned out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguish light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

That opening of 'the dull yellow eye' caused the first instance of my being truly scared by literary writing.  Where Jules Verne had thrilled me, Mary Shelley had terrified me.

What with it being winter and all, our tale appropriately begins in the icy wastes of the Arctic, where a man more dead than alive is hauled aboard a sailing ship.  When the man comes to his senses, he tells the story of how he came to be marooned on the ice.  Through his tale he, Victor Frankenstein, a scientist, takes his listeners on a journey from the high vales of the Alps, to extremities of Britain and Ireland and then on into the deep north of Russia and out onto the polar ice. Frankenstein relates how in an attempt to find a cure for the physical ills of humankind he had given life to a monster, a monster that had pursued, haunted and ruined him.

The great thing about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is that it bears little resemblance to Hollywood's Karlovian treatments of the story.  No, the monster is lithe and quick, intelligent and sly, and there is a great philosophical and psychological depth to the story of a creature who yearns to gain acceptance from the creator who shuns and reviles him, of how a worthy and innocent individual is perverted by the prejudices and the unrelenting unkindness of those who should know better and of those who don't.

Frankenstein is arguably  a work of genius, and it is hard to believe it was written by an eighteen-year-old woman in an era when everything was stacked against outstanding female achievement in public undertakings.  Then again, Mary's parents were William Godwin, the political theorist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, both exceptional people who mingled with exceptional people.

I read the Penguin edition, which contains a very informative introductory essay about the book and its creation. The tale of how Frankenstein came to be written is an intriguing one, but that's another story.