Could you say that again?

One of the things that I find most interesting about blogging, is the idea that what I write might connect with someone on the other side of the planet.

Unfortunately, being a lazy Englishman, I speak no other language fluently and have only a fleeting understanding of a couple of European languages.

A few of you have left comments in other languages, and though they may be complimentary or fascinating, they may for all I know be horribly offensive. I'm afraid that I cannot accept comments that are not in English.

Sorry.

The dissection room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials

So how did Victor Frankenstein make his monster? It is not at all clear from the novel. For although Victor speaks a great deal about charnel houses and dissection rooms, it seems more that Victor is using these places to study the effects of decay. He is trying to understand life by studying death.

Victor discovers how to impart life - or at least animation - but he needed 'frame for the reception of it'. He wants to build something that will be a receptacle for the life-force he will create and he decides that it will be easier to work on a giant. He makes his creature eight feet tall.

It is true that Victor talks of the challenge involved in all those 'fibres, muscles and veins' but again it is not clear whether he is sewing these together or starting from scratch. Mary actually says, Perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured. . .

Manufacturing component parts? That sounds very twenty-first century. Growing organs is a very recent development, but Mary Shelley seems to foresee it. Of course it might be possible that he was stitching these 'manufactured' parts together, but there is no mention of stitches in her description of the creature.

Interestingly enough, Frankenstein was filmed as early as 1910, by the Edison company. In this version - and it's on YouTube - the monster is seen to grow from nothing. Considering its age, it is actually a pretty creepy special effect (achieved, so it appears, by burning an effigy and running the film backwards). What is more, this process seems to be a magical one.


The fact is, it was alchemy that was Victor Frankenstein's first passion when he went to university. Later he becomes fascinated with mathematics and particularly chemistry - perhaps what we might now call biochemistry. He was not a surgeon or a doctor.

One of the works said to preoccupy some alchemists was the production of an homunculus: a human grown in the laboratory. But homunculi means 'little human' and Frankenstein's creature was anything but small. But is this what he was up to? Was he creating a human from scratch?

Certainly when he comes to work on the creature's mate, he appears to have no access to graveyards or charnel houses at all. Why?

Because he is in the wilds or Orkney.

After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life

Tales of Terror from the Black Ship up for Salford Children's Book Award and the awards ceremony is on Friday at the Lowry Centre in Salford. Sadly I'm not going to be able to be there to applaud the winner. I'm head to head with Sally Nicholls again, as I was with the North-East Book Award. The other shortlisted authors are Michelle Magorian, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Emma Clayton and Elizabeth laird.

So - back to Frankenstein. Everybody knows how the creature was brought to life don't they. Frankenstein uses electricity. That's what those bolts in the monster's neck are for. Well - perhaps. . .

Except that Mary Shelley does not say how the creature was brought to life. She neatly sidesteps this issue by explaining - as Victor Frankenstein - that this knowledge is too dangerous to pass on. We all assume it must be electricity because of the great 'It's alive!' scene in James Whale's movie. Mary's monster does not look like Karloff's monster - there are no bolts.

Whales did not completely invent this notion. Although the novel does not mention electricity, the introduction to the 1831 edition does. Perhaps, writes Mary, a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.

A little later, when she is talking about the nightmare that triggered the novel, she says that in her dream she saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

So there is some foundation for Whales' lightning bolt and strange machinery. Luigi Galvani had made a dead frog's leg jump as though alive. In 1805, Giovanni Aldini wowed London with 're-animation' experiments as public performances, running electricity through the corpses or hanged men until they twitched and jerked and grimaced.

But Whales also had the example of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent movie, Metropolis. The scene where Maria is transformed into the robot is very similar to the scene in Frankenstein. Although there had always been a fear of science, the twentieth century is when the idea of the 'mad scientist' really seems to strike a chord.

But what about the business of how the creature is made - before it is 'endued with vital warmth'. Again ask almost anyone and they will tell you that it was made from pieces of corpses stitched together.

But was he?

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils

I was interested to read today - or was it yesterday - that Danny Boyle is to return to the theatre. Not only that, but he is to direct an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

I have spoken at length about my fascination with Frankenstein, but I'm going to go on about it some more. Hey - it's my blog and you can't stop me.

As I have said before, I did not become aware of Frankenstein through Mary Shelley's book. Frankenstein - or more properly Frankenstein's 'monster' - is now a firmly established myth and the image of the creature is as readily identifiable as Santa Claus or Batman.

But of course, that image has little or nothing to do with Mary Shelley's book. The image of Frankenstein we all know so well, is all down to the 1931 movie by James Whale, the performance of Boris Karloff and the skill of the great Universal make-up artist, Jack Pierce.


That image became even more fixed in the public consciousness than Bela Lugosi's Dracula. Before I ever saw James Whale's wonderful movie, I had see Fred Gwynne hamming it up as Herman Munster. The infinitely superior Addam's Family featured Lurch, the enormous growling butler who owed a large dept to Karloff.


The sequels to Frankenstein all kept the brand going, although by the time he was meeting Abbott and Costello, he had filled out a little and was now being played by Lon Chaney Jnr. Comedy spoofs, cartoons, comics - they all embraced this new ogre until he has become one of the cast of favourite Halloween characters and nothing more.


But as undeniably powerful as the Whale/Karloff creature was, it had almost nothing to do with Mary Shelley's vision of the monster:

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they are set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.

I think Karloff does have a beautiful face (but that might just be me) and his creature does have straight black lips, but Mary's description is of a classicly proportioned Byronic giant who should have been handsome if it wasn't for the fact the he does not look alive. The description is of an animated corpse and arguably much more chilling and disturbing.

But of course there is an even bigger difference. Mary Shelley's creature can talk. The shuffling mute of the movies is the biggest departure from the book, because it robs the creature of the opportunity to describe his feelings and attempt to explain his actions. Although Karloff does give a sympathetic performance, the creature of the book is an altogether different being.

So, Shelley's monster creature doesn't look or behave like the monster of the movies. But at least we all clear about how he was made and brought to life. . .

Or are we?

Handwriting

I had a meeting with Lisa Kirkham today - or my design guru, as I will now call her. We had a chat in the upstairs of Cafe Nero in town. I say chat - it actually lasted for hours. My fault, I suspect.

I was after some advice from Lisa concerning fonts and font creation. She brought along her laptop and showed me the lovely font she has designed and ran me through the process. It did not sound simple.

After a long discussion we both concluded that it may actually be safer and more straightforward to hand draw the lettering for my graphic novel, at least in the sort term. More about this when I have something to show.

The dead of winter

Yet more news of foreign editions today as Bloomsbury got in touch to tell me that Taiwan is to publish Tales of Terror from the Black Ship and Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. They have already published Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror.

And I found this when I was doing a Google trawl to see if I could come up with any new foreign edition cover artwork. It is the Bloomsbury Children's Book catalogue for the Frankfurt book fair last year.

This is the image that I did for the cover of my new novel The Dead of Winter (out in October).

Spanish ships

I had some more good news today on the foreign editions front. Uli Rushby-Smith at the rights department is obviously working overtime. There is to be a Spanish edition of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, published by Ediciones SM (who also published Uncle Montague in Spain).

I should also have said that the Czech publisher for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is Argo.