The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein [Import] [Paperback]

Peter Ackroyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 4, 2009

Peter Ackroyd’s imagination dazzles in this brilliant novel written in the voice of Victor Frankenstein himself. Mary Shelley and Shelley are characters in the novel.

It was at Oxford that I first met Bysshe. We arrived at our college on the same day; confusing to a mere foreigner, it is called University College. I had seen him from my window and had been struck by his auburn locks.
The long-haired poet — “Mad Shelley” — and the serious-minded student from Switzerland spark each other’s interest in the new philosophy of science which is overturning long-cherished beliefs. Perhaps there is no God. In which case, where is the divine spark, the soul? Can it be found in the human brain? The heart? The eyes?

Victor Frankenstein begins his anatomy experiments in a barn near Oxford. The coroner’s office provides corpses — but they have often died of violence and drowning; they are damaged and putrifying. Victor moves his coils and jars and electrical fluids to a deserted pottery and from there, makes contact with the Doomesday Men — the resurrectionists.

Victor finds that perfect specimens are hard to come by . . . until that Thames-side dawn when, wrapped in his greatcoat, he hears the splashing of oars and sees in the half-light the approaching boat where, slung into the stern, is the corpse of a handsome young man, one hand trailing in the water. . . .


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Book Description
When two nineteenth-century Oxford students--Victor Frankenstein, a serious researcher, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley--form an unlikely friendship, the result is a tour de force that could only come from one of the world's most accomplished and prolific authors.

This haunting and atmospheric novel opens with a heated discussion, as Shelley challenges the conventionally religious Frankenstein to consider his atheistic notions of creation and life. Afterward, these concepts become an obsession for the young scientist. As Victor begins conducting anatomical experiments to reanimate the dead, he at first uses corpses supplied by the coroner. But these specimens prove imperfect for Victor's purposes. Moving his makeshift laboratory to a deserted pottery factory in Limehouse, he makes contact with the Doomsday men--the resurrectionists--whose grisly methods put Frankenstein in great danger as he works feverishly to bring life to the terrifying creature that will bear his name for eternity.

Filled with literary lights of the day such as Bysshe Shelley, Godwin, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley herself, and penned in period-perfect prose, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is sure to become a classic of the twenty-first century.

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Peter Ackroyd on The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

It is of course obviously true that Frankenstein is a wonderful story, and I was eager to see if I could extend it in other directions. It is a myth and a history, an allegory and a nightmare. I wanted to see if it was possible to maintain all those elements in a re-interpretation of the original text.

I had been greatly impressed by Mary Shelley’s original, but I was eager to tease out some of her assumptions and themes.

I had always been interested in the Romantic movement of English poetry, in the early nineteenth century, and the story of Victor Frankenstein allowed me to explore all the possible meanings of "romantic" in that context. This also meant that I could discuss the worship of electricity and new science in the period. But it also allowed me to introduce the "real" characters of Byron and others into the plot. I wanted to set the story in London, as a way of re-imagining and re-creating the nineteenth-century city. I also wanted to see if I could recreate the language and texture of the period so that the reader would feel connected in an intimate way with a culture and civilization that have now disappeared.

In that I was greatly assisted by the fact that I wrote and presented a series on BBC Television, entitled The Romantics, which allowed me to suggest the lines of continuity between Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and of course Mary Shelley herself. All of these people appear in the novel itself. I was also helped by the fact that in the course of filming I went to all of the sites that appear in the novel itself, particularly the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley had the original inspiration for her novel. We spent one night filming there, and on the balcony of the house I had an intimation of the novel I was about to write.--Peter Ackroyd

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Medical student Victor Frankenstein imbibes fellow student Bysshe Shelley's belief in the perfectability of mankind and strives to create a being of infinite benevolence in this recasting of Mary Shelley's horror classic from Ackroyd (First Light). When Victor reanimates the body of acquaintance Jack Keat, he's so horrified at the implications of his Promethean feat that he abandons his creation. Outraged, the Keat creature shadows Victor as an avenging doppelgänger, bringing misery and death to those dearest to him. Ackroyd laces his narrative intelligently with the Romantic ideals of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and deftly interweaves Victor's fictional travails with events of the well-known 1816 meeting between the poets that inspired Mary to draft her landmark story. His hasty surprise ending may strike some readers as a cheat, though most will agree that his novel is a brilliant riff on ideas that have informed literary, horror and science fiction for nearly two centuries. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books (May 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099524139
• ISBN-13: 978-0099524137
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 1 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,338,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars --- Or, a postmodern Prometheus, September 28, 2009

By 

O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (Paperback)

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is a super novel and one which gets better and better as it goes on. Peter Ackroyd is well known as a contemporary authority on London, and few writers today or at any time previously have so single-mindedly memorialised this wonderful city: Ackroyd has written not just London's widely acclaimed Biography, a companion piece about the Thames: Sacred River that flows through it, and biographies of its more famous sons (William Blake and Geoffrey Chaucer) and some historical fiction largely set in the city.

In this context it comes as no surprise that Peter Ackroyd's reworking of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is also set largely in the city, despite the original's setting in and around Geneva. On a broad scale Ackroyd's historical themes are unified: the galvanic force of electricity invigorates and brings life; in the same way the river flows through and animates the great metropolis. Life having been given, in each case does as it will, as dirty and degenerate as it is upstanding and honorable, and it is surely no coincidence that Ackroyd's creature makes his home in the wild reaches of the Thames estuary, and draws strength and wickedness in equal measure from its frequent immersion in the river, both at Limehouse and up river at Marlow.

Ackroyd's historical rendering of early nineteenth century is (as far as I can tell!) flawless and as usual is exquisitely, intricately observed, and his adoption of the register of a novelist of the period is equally well rendered.

The other interesting aspect of this novel is the depiction of the romantic poets and their entourage: "Bysshe" Shelley features from the outset as a struggling and somewhat neurotic gadfly; we meet Lord Byron somewhat later (a pompous, overbearing, spoilt fool) together with Mary Shelley herself (depicted far more sympathetically as the real artist amongst a bunch of dilettantes) and Byron's long-suffering physician/drug supplier, John Polidori. The interactions of these historical figures, with their own (fictional) creation Victor Frankenstein in their midst - together with, unannounced, *his* fictional creation (yet another sweet irony!) - drives the plot for the last half, across the continent to Villa Diodati for the famous night of Gothic ghost stories and then inevitably, like a moth to a light, back to the sacred Thames for the final denouement.

It's a slow burner, but the more I reflected on a neat little tweak at the death, the more my admiration grew for Peter Ackroyd's achievement here. And the book's title is a neat little in-joke in itself.

A modern - post-modern, even - Prometheus indeed.

Olly Buxton

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I loved Shelley's version so much I guess I hoped for more, November 2, 2009

By 

Satia Renee "Satia Renee" (Altanta GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd is a retelling of the gothic classic Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. As with all retellings, one approaches the new version with trepidation. Is there a need to retell a story that has already been told so well? Will this version offer anything new or interesting? What, if anything will be lost in translation?

When I began the novel, I stepped back a bit from my own expectations and tried to allow Ackroyd to give me the pleasure of revisiting a story I found compelling and provocative. I quickly realized that story is told in first person by Victor Frankenstein I was put off. After all, for all intents and purposes, Shelley's version is told in the first person. Is there a need to tell the same story in the same point-of-view? My resistance grew, mostly because what details were added are lu1rid or meant to be salacious (after all, Shelley could not dare write in detail about erections and penises, could she?). Sadly, they are also predictable. Characters enter the stage with the inevitability of their future clearly evident.

But of course one would expect a story that is retold to be somewhat predictable. And the fact is, for those readers who are disinclined to read classic literature because it is tedious or tiresome or the tone too archaic, Ackroyd's choice to tell this story again serves a purpose. He departs enough from the classic by inviting Mary Shelley herself into the cast of characters, along with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. The flavor of London is very well written. One cannot argue that Ackroyd knows his history and contextualizes the story both in content and voice. His ability to weave details leaves few, if any, stones unturned. And although the conclusion is different from the original novel's, it is not as surprising as it should have been. (How surprising would it have been had the author chosen to carry the story forth to the same ending, one that in Shelley's version occurs off the stage of the page? Perhaps bringing something new to an expected ending is too much to ask but if the ending must be changed can it not be changed in such a way as to surprise the reader?)

What this retelling lacks is the spiritual and philosophical implications of Shelley's original vision. Given the evolution of society, the threat of science over religion is perhaps no longer an issue but there is still so much room for debate on the ethical implications of where science crosses lines of morality in the face of necessity. At what point does the need for knowledge become more necessary than the need for morality? And in a world where we can create virtual selves by simply logging into a website, what are the implications of revivifying something that is dead?

In the end, Ackroyd presents a novel that waters down the original making it perhaps more palatable for the masses but offering little in the way of real meaning. A good summer beach book for those who don't want their summer reading light. Or perhaps the type of book one would read to fill a rainy afternoon in autumn. But for my tastes, I'll stick with the original which is, to this day, a more provocative story than many being published today.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You'll get a charge out of this one!, September 24, 2009

By 

Dick Johnson (Oklahoma USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (Paperback)

Ackroyd has to have a portal into pre-20th century England and Europe. He has this knack of taking us back to those days and immediately immersing us into that society. We travel with Victor Frankenstein, Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron as the events unfold.

The Editorial Reviews and blurb by Ackroyd above will tell you plenty about the goings on. We take a tour that is more mystery than horror as Victor experiments with his electrical fluids.

This is a page turner - the finish comes too soon. The author's language puts you in the period without hitting you in the head with it. He delves in depth with the story and doesn't bore the reader with the superfluous.

If you have a liking for Victorian England, Frankenstein stories and a good yarn - grab a copy, brew a cuppa and enjoy.