PETER Ackroyd is the wiliest of writers. Read his fictions at your peril, for what you meet are driven obsessions, deceptions and plots of a stylish complexity, mingling wit and high intelligence. As time passes in Ackroyd's fictions, substance turns
into myth and reality melts almost unnoticed into fakery.
The obsessive Ackroyd sometimes loses himself in plots that over-thicken the myths in question, or joke themselves merrily into tangles of clever allusion.
In The Casebook Of Victor Frankenstein though, he returns to what he knows best: a London setting, in the early 19th century. From its opening pages, the voice of Frankenstein, debonair, his diction precise, combs through his childhood – brought up in Switzerland, reaching student days in Oxford, meeting the poet Percy Shelley, discussing the new electrical science, the power of lightning to bring life to inanimate being. His speech is measured, so steeped in realism you swallow it, unaware of the fakery to come.
Readers will know that Frankenstein is a fictional being, first seeing the light in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, four years before Ackroyd's story opens. Ackroyd incorporates Mary Shelley into his tale, along with her husband, (referred to as Bysshe), Byron and Wordsworth. He shifts the action from Oxford to London, from a barn to a Limehouse pottery manufactory, now derelict, and he cranks up Victor's obsession from shooting volts through tiny animals to enervating excavated human remains.
Ackroyd brews a toxic mood of deepening gothic horror, concocting a picture of London, revoltingly noxious and degenerate, the roughage of everyday life in disgusting pathetic visibility. It's a brilliant, impressionistic piece of literary art, and Ackroyd's forte.
Aficionados of Mary Shelley's original may quibble at some of the narrative alterations – Ackroyd, for instance, inventing the murder of Shelley's first wife, who drowned in the Serpentine, and then the hanging of an innocent.
This heightens the moral complexity of the tale, which does not need it. Already the wisdom of interfering with the processes of life, and the salient matter of being responsible for that which we have created, is enough to ponder. What it does need though is more pace in the first hundred pages, before the acceleration towards the twist that makes sense of everything and nothing by the end.
The full article contains 396 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
