Friday, October 25, 2013

Frankenstein (Conclusion)

Victor is aware that the monster intends to kill off all of Victor’s loved ones, but each time it happens, it’s a surprise.  Not that he can do anything about it; the monster seems endowed with supernatural powers!  I mentioned previously that when I was a kid, the Frankenstein monster didn’t seem so scary to me because he was always depicted as being very slow, wobbling back and forth stiff-legged with his arms stretched out in front of him.  The literal monster here, however, is not only more powerful than any mere man, but much faster as well.  When Victor makes a thing out of spare parts, he doesn’t fool around! 

He has already decided not to continue his Build-A-Bride project and to depart the desolation of the Orkney Islands of Bonnie Scotland, when disaster strikes.  He takes a little sailboat out onto the placid sea at night in order to dump the Bride’s body parts overboard, and on the way back he is so relieved (and emotionally exhausted) that he lays down in the sailboat and falls asleep.  Oops.  He wakes up to a violent sea, no land in sight, and sure that he’s out of luck, only to eventually come to shore in … Ireland.  (And apparently, southern Ireland, as he later takes a short trip to Dublin later in order to leave the country.  Of course, these British Isles look so tiny on the globe…) He is met here with hostility and eventually accused of a murder.  Not just any murder, either, but the murder of his friend Henry Clerval, whom he left and last saw in Perth, Scotland.  Clever monster! 

The monster continues to taunt him, promising to be with him on his wedding night.  This is a warning that when he marries his betrothed, Elizabeth, the monster will attack again.  Somehow it doesn’t occur to him that she is the intended.  Victim.  So on his wedding night, he sends her into the bedroom by herself while he prepares to do battle with the monster.  Oops, again.  This genius who created the world’s first AI (sci-fi acronym for “Artificial Intelligence”) can’t seem to get with the program of victims.  Her screams from the bedroom remind him once again that he is only the indirect target of this menu of mayhem. 

If I seem to be making fun of this excellent work, well, that’s just me.  Any classic can be picked apart like that, (I love the Mad magazine spoofs on modern-day cinematic masterpieces!) but it remains to be said that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one.  The fast pace keeps it moving forward; many of today’s best-selling authors would do well to take this aspect to heart.  The historical significance of this work cannot be over-stated – it really was way ahead of its time.  The fact that its publisher felt it had to be toned down to avoid offending the sentiments of the readers of that time is fascinating; I have a very hard time finding anything in this that I would have felt necessary to change, if I were Mary, trying to please the publisher.  I had honestly expected a lot more gruesomeness, especially in the initial collecting and assembling of the body parts.
 
So Victor pursues the monster to the end of the earth (literally, almost to the North Pole) to try to destroy him, but dies on the stranded ship in the ice.  The monster’s work is done.  Only destroying himself remains, which he plans to do by burning himself in solitude; apparently not “at the stake” because there would be no one to tie him to it.  The captain of the ship decides not to grant Victor’s last wish and destroy the beast himself.  Good decision, since he has no idea how to go about doing that!  And the monster jumps ship and disappears into the night - leading to all the cheesy sequels that kept us awake after the late night movies we watched back in the day!







Join us next month for November’s book of the month; “Big Red Tequila,” Rick Riordan.  We will take an extra week to recover from the pre-diabetic sugar binge of Halloween, and begin on November 9th! 
 
Riordan has loaded his first mystery with lots of genre baggage: this story about a man coming home to San Antonio, Texas, to rescue his old girlfriend and solve the 12-year-old murder of his sheriff father is a virtual homage to James (The Last Good Kiss) Crumley. But Riordan writes so well about the people and topography of his hometown that he very quickly marks the territory as his own. Tres Navarre has put behind him the teenage days when he and his friend Ralph Arguello would cruise through San Antonio, drinking a ferocious mixture of cheap tequila and Big Red cream soda. A University of California Ph.D. in English plus a fascination with t'ai chi ch'uan led Tres naturally enough to work as a private investigator in San Francisco. But one call from the love of his early life--the mysterious and captivating Lillian Cambridge, now trapped in dangerous work and love relationships--and Tres gladly trades his trendy Peet's coffee for the stronger brews of home.  

Winner of the 1998 Shamus Award for Best First Novel and the 1998 Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original!

"A standout...A crooked construction company, corrupt cops, old enemies--you can almost feel the summer storms rolling over South Texas."
---Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Friday, October 18, 2013

Frankenstein (Part Two, Chapter Six through Part Three, Chapter Three)


Although this is not exactly edge-of-your-seat can’t-put-it-down reading, the prose is quite lively and never gets tedious or pedantic.  The action keeps moving forward, with interesting changes of setting and events.  The visit of Victor and his friend Clerval to London and parts north is told at exactly the right pace, with colorful asides describing how different it all is to a couple of young men from Switzerland.  Victor’s reason for being here is to get information he needs to comply with the monster’s blackmail. 

Those old, cheesy movies that would come on late Friday or Saturday night back in the early 1960s keep coming to mind, though this story is told with a lot more style and taste.  One or more of those movies was about The Bride of Frankenstein.  I had always thought that concept was the creation of some over-imaginative director or producer – so I found it surprising to discover that creating a mate for our monster is very much a part of this section of the story!  At first, it seemed that we were definitely on our way to seeing the object of his dreams in all her big-hair-with-silver-streaks glory.  This entire section of the book has Victor anguishing over the fact that he is committed to creating the “Bride” in order to protect his own loved ones from destruction at the hands of the blackmailing monster. 

Only after going through all the trouble of traveling to London from Geneva, then to Oxford and other English destinations to the north, and up through Scotland to Edinburgh (which I find once again described, as in so many other sources, as a place of great beauty and esthetic delight!), followed by his companion’s destination at Perth, and Victor’s subsequent solitary trip up to the desolate Orkney Islands, does he start on his dreaded project of creating yet another monster.  After all this, is finally dawns on him that perhaps the result of this new creation might be worse than the consequences to himself of abstaining.  In a very unscientific turn of thought, (this is, after all the early 1800s upon time of writing) he seems to assume that the two monsters will actually be able to produce offspring!  He imagines that he might be unleashing a horde of nightmarish creatures to become the scourge of humanity.  We have to wonder if maybe he had thought of this before his trip to Great Britain, he might have been able to save himself a lot of trouble, not to mention anguish over what he perceived to be his fate. 

We seem to be giving up a lot to artistic license here, and yet – it’s all a lot of fun!  The writing continues to be very engaging and lively, though I still think it might not appeal to anyone younger than high school age.  It is “science fiction” in the actual meaning of the phrase, which is more accurately termed “speculative fiction.”  And Sci-Fi buffs are typically relentless about picking holes in the theories of their authors, who subsequently have become more conscious of getting the “science” right more often than they did early on.  Even H. G. Wells employed some very scientific-sounding reasoning in the design and theory behind his famous Time Machine.
 
All in all, “Frankenstein” is a great read, flowing along at a nice pace, which is a bonus for a relatively plodding reader like me.  I have already anticipated re-reading it at some time in the not-so-distant future, and that is a pretty rare event for me.  While some people I know read the same books over and over, apparently simply enjoying the ride, I virtually always thirst for something new to read.  It is easy to see why this work has endured, beyond the initial shock factor it had and the utter originality it offered at the time.  Two big green stitched-on thumbs up!







Next Week: Conclusion

Friday, October 11, 2013

Frankenstein (Part One, Chapter Six through Part Two, Chapter Five)

Chapter Six begins with a letter from Victor’s father in which the next phase of the plot is clearly launched.  Victor’s little five-year-old brother has been murdered, and the evidence points to young Justine as the murderer.  On the way home, he passes through the vicinity of the murder site and encounters the amazingly nimble monster he created!  He is convinced that the monster actually committed the murder.  At this point I was reminded that I had watched a movie version of “Frankenstein” many years ago – or perhaps just bits and pieces of the movie – in which a young girl (Justine?) befriends the monster, and that the monster had killed the boy by accident, not understanding what he was doing.  I also seem to remember a scene in which a mob of people with torches pursues the monster at night.  It will be interesting to see how much of this is reflected in the actual text. 

There are several rather odd plot devices that some people might consider just a little too convenient for the author.  For instance, when the monster holes up in an apparently completely unused shed-like structure attached to a shack, he is allowed to eavesdrop through a boarded up window and listen to every word that the inhabitants of the shack utter for months.  The fact that they never hear him make a sound - even snoring when he sleeps – and never think to use or look in the shed for any reason, is just a little too far-fetched.  Mary Shelley is asking us to suspend our credulity here, and in other ways as well.  Perhaps the biggest leap of faith is the fact that the monster employs first-rate diction and elocution in relating his tale to Victor after listening in on the family that lives in the shack for a short while; more than likely a family that doesn’t speak with very admirable elocution itself. 

And looking back to earlier passages, I seem to have missed the segments that I had always been led to believe were in this book regarding the acquisition and assembly of the various body parts and how they were supposedly obtained from questionable sources like a graveyard for criminals.  My understanding is that the version of the story I’m reading is unabridged, so I don’t think these more gruesome details were simply left out.  Also, this copy is supposed to be the original text, before Ms. Shelley was compelled to revise the book so that it wouldn’t offend her readers’ sensibilities.  This classic story has been reworked and embellished in so many ways over the years that I was probably misled on this point. 

The monster’s tale – a story within a story within a story (remember that Victor is relating all this to the captain of the ship in the arctic; our original narrator) – overlooks a number if difficulties and questions left unexplained.  As far as we can tell, the monster “woke up” a blank slate, having no memories remaining from his brain’s previous life.  And yet, he learns how to feed himself, acquires all the survival skills he needs to keep from perishing in the wild, picks up a language by overhearing it, and generally seems to have skipped vast segments of the childhood learning curves we normal people have spent our lives mastering.  But all this serves the purpose of the author in having the monster narrate what happened to him in first person. 

It probably has occurred to most of us that writing in first person relieves an author of many of the burdens of writing well.  After all, any discrepancies, contradictions and even grammatical errors can simply be written off as the idiosyncrasies of the narrating character.  Was Ms. Shelley, at the age of nineteen, perhaps a little apprehensive that her craftsmanship as a writer would be subjected to severe criticism?  So far, her story has had three different first person narrators.  The language to modern ears seems quite erudite, so it’s hard to make such a charge stick.  I particularly like first person prose, so it doesn’t bother me in the least, but I have to believe that was part of the reason.  At any rate, it makes for a very entertaining read in this case!
 

 

 

Next Week: Part Two, Chapter Six through Part Three, Chapter Three

Friday, October 4, 2013

Frankenstein (Up to Part One, Chapter Six)

Of all the people who might put off reading this classic until their Fifties, I might be the least likely candidate.  I’m shaking my head over it even now.  When I was a boy, I loved everything about “monsters”; I put together the prefabricated monster models, watched as many late-night monster movies as my parents would allow, read all the monster-themed comic books and storybooks I could find, and so on.  Even my interest in “The Wizard of Oz,” “Star Trek” and all the other early “space”-oriented TV shows, the soap opera “Dark Shadows,” and later in life my almost exclusive reading of science fiction all had their roots in this Monster Mania.  But Frankenstein?  Interesting, I supposed; but any monster that I felt I could outrun just didn’t terrify me all that much… 

Also, the little information that did trickle through to me about this book seemed to indicate that is was mostly about “boring adult stuff.”  And yes, I would have had a hard time appreciating it at the age of nine, or thereabouts.  When I read Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” a couple of years ago, I enjoyed it immensely more than I did as a child.  (Alternatively, I think I would have enjoyed “The Chronicles of Narnia” more then than now.)  This book does start off rather slow, working its way very gradually toward the main premise, which really only manifests at the beginning of Chapter Four. 

I had known that the story took place partly in the icy Arctic, which to my mind had always seemed a preposterously desperate attempt on the part of the author to add interest to the settings of the story.  But I had not realized that the story practically begins there.  That our first glimpse of the monster was from a distance, being pulled in a sleigh by a team of dogs in extreme arctic regions was an almost ludicrous surprise.  Up till then, we were taken through several personal letters written by a rather minor character in the story, followed by a number of pages describing an arctic expedition by ship.  If this all seems a rather unnecessary preamble to the story as related by the scientist rescued by the ship’s crew, it is at least entertainingly written.  Ms. Shelley wrote this - much of it, anyway - at the age of nineteen, and the verbiage displays that impeccably correct Literary English found in the works of most of the great British authors.  I almost always enjoy this style of writing very much.  Individual words are seemingly chosen very meticulously to impart meaning with great precision.  The level of communication is greatly enhanced (or should I have said “magnified”?) by this means. 

So we finally get to the point of the Scientist (we have yet to be told his name) telling his story.  Here again, we get a lot of background that has little to do with the premise.  But, also again, it is engagingly written with a lot of food for thought bordering on the philosophical.  Most of this prepares us to understand why the Scientist discovered how to do what he did – why his thought processes were so different from his peers as to lead him to discoveries that no one else ever made.  Starting with Natural History followed by an immersion in Chemistry leading to an obsession for discovering how and why life arises; all these steps are nicely illustrated.  When he has his “Aha Experience” the obsession really kicks in – and now we have a more unhealthy obsessive “addiction” to his scientific quest.
 
It’s interesting to watch the process unfold.  “None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.  In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.  A mind of moderate capacity, which closely pursues one study, must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study…”  But later:  “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”  Here we see the aspect of this work as a Cautionary Tale.  This is “Science as Pandora’s Box.”  And therein lies the “horror” of this classic Horror Story.




Next week's segment: Part One, Chapter Six through Part Two, Chapter Five