Top hats and tales

Sarah Odedina from Bloomsbury emailed this to me. It is the Dutch bind-up of the first two Tales of Terror books. I'm not sure whether that makes it more, or less, likely they are taking the third, but it looks good doesn't it? I love the look of that word verschrikkelijke by the way.

I met up with Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart in Cambridge today. They were in town for an event at Heffer's, organised by Kate Johnson. I caught up with them before they were booked to go on and then joined my wife and son for something to eat before heading down Trinity Street to the bookshop.

We ended up walking behind some King's College School boys - from the choir I think. In top hats and gowns. Cambridge is a bit like that. I am constantly aware of another world going on that I am removed from - the world of the public schools and the University. I constantly toy with the idea of setting something in Cambridge that will deal with this idea of a secret world running parallel to the mundane one the rest of us inhabit. But whether small boys in top hats will feature, I couldn't really say.

Paul and Chris were on good form. I envy them the mutual support of a double act. It works well and they obviously feel very relaxed. Chris draws and Paul reads the odd extract and waits patiently while Chris completes another interruption. They play off one another like a couple of old jazz musicians.

It was well-attended, like all Heffer's events, and we left them signing books for a very long queue of of their fans. Chris and Paul are two of my favourite people and I wish them well with their new book, Wyrmeweald, which is out soon.

As for me, Philippa, my agent, has just confirmed an offer from Bloomsbury for my new book proposal. The provisional title is Mister Creecher, and I will tell you more about it over the next few months as I write it. For now I will simply say that it is strongly related to my recent blog fixation with Frankenstein. . .

Is he man or monster?

When I was a teenager I drew all the time. I tended to respond to anything I saw or read by doing a drawing or two. These were often no more than doodles. I remember doing something a little more finished for Frankenstein though - it was an ink drawing with a colour wash over it and it was heavily influenced by that Signet Classics cover.

The creature was in silhouette against a night sky with a full moon behind. I don't have access to that drawing now - it is in one of many folios that remain in storage - but interestingly, I revisited the image when I came to do roughs for the cover of Redwulf's Curse - the third of the Tom Marlowe mysteries. My original idea was to have the mysterious guardian of the barrow standing alone in the marshes. I was persuaded that this was too stark at the time - but I still prefer it to the one I eventually did.

By the time the cover reached the finished version it had gone through so many tweaks that it had lost the quality it had at the beginning. A lot of the book plays on the fear of desolate places and the image had lost sense of that somehow. The book was eventually repackaged with a completely different cover anyway.

This is the drawing of the creature that graced the frontispiece of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. It shows the moment where Victor looks at his work and recoils in horror. Note the skeleton under the creatures legs. And the lack of stitches.

The great American illustrator Lynd Ward decided to show the scene where Victor wakes to find the creature looking down at him through the bed curtains. His illustrations were published a few years after the James Whale movie, but as you can see, his is a very different creature from Karloff's, again with no signs of having been cobbled together from spare parts.



Bernie Wrightson used a very similar image in this more recent illustration for the novel. Wrightson's creature is even more muscular than Lynd Ward's and not surprisingly comics had been quick to see the potential of Frankenstein.


Stan Lee's The Incredible Hulk is a clever cross between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein, but the latter probably had the bigger influence - not only in its fear of science but also in the way Jack Kirby was clearly influenced by the movie representation of Frankenstein when he came to draw Bruce Banner's alter ego.


In the early 1970s - when I was discovering Frankenstein as both movie and novel, Marvel even used Mary Shelley's story as the basis for a series of comics with the creature as the main character - Monster of Frankenstein (later Frankenstein's Monster).

When I was on the Foundation year at art college, in 1976/7, we had to submit a proposal for a graphics project and mine was to do a graphic novel treatment of Frankenstein. I was told - quite rightly - that it was too big a job for the time allowed. It was more of a 2nd Year project. And by the time the 2nd Year came round, I had other things on my mind.

A big part of my desire to do that project was the urge to tell the story exactly as Mary Shelley had written it. Now - thirty-odd years later - I'm not sure that I have the same need to be true to Mary in that way.

I tell my own stories now and though my fascination with Frankenstein has never dimmed - and the idea of of doing a graphic novel of the book still appeals, I find I want to respond to the book in a more oblique and personal way.

Frankenstein unbound

I was a big fan of science fiction when I was in my teens, so a science fiction book that sprang from Frankenstein was always going to be a hit. Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss imagines a future world where time is fractured allowing a scientist to slip back to the 1800s where he meets both Mary Shelley and the characters in her novel. The title is a play on both the subtitle to Frankenstein - The Modern Prometheus - and to the play by P B Shelley - Prometheus Unbound. It was made into a pretty awful film by Roger Corman.


Peter Ackroyd has also produced a kind of parallel novel to Frankenstein with his recent The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein which imagines Victor meeting Shelley at Oxford and his creature as being a tubercular poet.


These versions make no secret of the fact that they are reworking Mary Shelley's story. But right from the start, the adaptations strayed wildly from her novel. And Frankenstein was adapted almost immediately.

In fact had in not been adapted, the novel might have sunk without trace. It sold only five hundred copies when it first came out in 1818. But in 1823 a version of the story with the Austen-like title of Presumption was put on at the English Opera House in the Strand without permission. Mary didn't seem bothered though, and said she thoroughly enjoyed it.

The play was a great success, but it seemed to set a template for further adaptations. Victor becomes a mad scientist with fizzing electrical paraphernalia, he gets a German assistant called Fritz, but most importantly, the creature becomes a 'monster' and is a mute.


Frankenstein: The True Story was a TV movie I remember settling down to watch in the 1970s assuming that this would be a faithful adaptation of the novel (it being the 'true' story). But no - it introduces John Polidori as a character in the novel rather than a member of the Byron set, and has Victor studying in London rather than Bavaria, where he is oddly led astray by Henry Clerval, his blameless friend in the novel. A female creature is successfully created, though the male creature does, unfortunately, pull her head off. And that, as they say, has got to hurt.

It does have the nice conceit of making the creature attractive and able to pass as human. The horror comes as he decays but does not die. That seems to carry some kind of faithfulness to Mary's idea of Victor having intended to make something beautiful.


Kenneth Branagh's version was sold as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but it too could not resist fiddling with the plot (or filming himself stripped to the waist like he was in a Duran Duran video). For some strange reason, after adhering to the novel in most respects (there is the arctic setting, Victor is Swiss, the creature talks) he has the monster insist on Victor reanimating the hanged Justine as his mate, and when Frankenstein refuses, the monster rips out the heart of Elizabeth as punishment. But that's not all - he then has Victor re-animate Elizabeth and Frankenstein and his creature fight for possession of her (while she, revolted by her appearance, destroys herself by fire). It is hard to see how those changes improve on Mary's novel. Better to freely adapt than tinker.

There is still no definitive version of Mary Shelley's book, even after nearly two hundred years and countless adaptations by everyone from Hammer to Andy Warhol and James Whale's versions are still the best movies. Interestingly, the director Danny Boyle is returning to the theatre next year to produce a new staging of Frankenstein.

Now that really should be worth seeing.

I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being

This is the battered copy of the paperback version of Frankenstein I read when I was in my teens. It is a cheap - you could even call it pulp - edition, published by Signet Classics. But I still like that cover. I like it as an illustration and as a piece of simple design, but I also like the fact that the creature is running, not shuffling, and that there is a vulnerability to him. It is not a picture of a monster.

I'm sure I saw the James Whale movie first, but I can't remember when I saw it or when I picked this book up to read - although I would hazard a guess at some time in my mid-teens. What I do remember though was the effect it had on me.

I was astonished to discover that the world-famous character of Frankenstein's monster bore no resemblance whatsoever to the character in the book. He could talk! He could read! He could run! He could even drive a sled drawn by huskies!!!

And he was a sympathetic character, despite his crimes. Victor called him a devil and a fiend, but he was so much more than a mere bogeyman. He looked different too. He was a raven-haired Romantic anti-hero. If there was a lot of Shelley in Frankenstein, there was a fair old dose of Byron in the shunned and exiled creature.

Then there was the setting. I now understood that the novel belonged to the early nineteenth century in the time of Beethoven and Byron. I had assumed all the action took place in some Mittel-European schloss, and was absolutely amazed to find that the action opened aboard a ship in the arctic. It is an incredible opening - a series of letters that do not at first seem to have any connection with what I thought I knew of the action. The first inkling there is of what is to come is at the beginning of Letter 4 when Walton tells of seeing a giant figure on a sled drawn by dogs racing across the ice.

But I was even more surprised to discover that Victor Frankenstein and his creature both visit England and that the attempt to create a mate takes place on Orkney of all places. Frankenstein and his friend Clerval visit London (in a visit lasting months) and then go to Oxford, Matlock in Derbyshire, and the Lake District before going on to Scotland - with the creature watching their every move. Frankenstein's creature visited Britain! I found that idea incredibly exciting. I still do.

And if you needed more convincing that there is something else going on than the simple stitching together of body parts then the events leading up to the creation of the mate should help.

When Frankenstein is in London he says that he was 'principally occupied with the means of obtaining the information necessary for the completion of my promise' (to build a mate) and carries a letter of introduction to an unnamed 'distinguished natural philosopher'. He then says that he 'began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation'.

Since there is no mention of grave-robbing on Orkney, then it would seem to suggest that he was carrying body parts with him for months on end, to Oxford and to Matlock and the Lakes. That is obviously impossible and Mary knew it would be impossible. Clearly she meant something else.

And even if we thought that he had gathered chemicals on his tour and then squirreled body parts away on a sparsely populated island, then the grisly scene where he destroys the mate gives a little more food for thought. . .

The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being.

Frankenstein could simply be saying that he 'almost' felt like he had destroyed the living flesh of a human being because the gruesome remains looked like a dismembered body, but he could also mean that the thing he had created, by whatever means, looked so convincing that he 'almost' felt that it really was human flesh.

In any case, that battered copy of Frankenstein started a lifelong fascination with both Gothic horror, the Romantic era and the Shelley/Byron set.

It's pronounced Fronkensteen!

There has been some speculation that Victor Frankenstein was Jewish, although there seems to be no evidence for this in the text. But it is interesting that the Jewish tradition does contain a precedent for Frankenstein's creature in the Golem.

The most well-known version of this story is that of Rabbi Loew who was supposed to have created a golem to protect the Jews of Prague in the sixteenth century. The Golem was - like Adam - made from clay and then given life by the magical means using the Kabbalah - the mystical powers of the Hebrew alphabet. He is brought to life using the word EMETH (truth) scratched into his forehead, and stopped by rubbing out the first letter and leaving METH (death). He is destroyed by rubbing out all the letters.

But Frankenstein's creature is not an I-must-obey robot creation. He is autonomous. In the movies he tends to be a shuffling precursor to George Romero's zombies, but in the book, he has feelings and desires. He is not so much undead and as unalive. He is like the not-quite-human-enough androids of Bladerunner. Like Pinocchio, he wants to be a real boy.


The German name of Frankenstein that Mary borrowed, may simply sound as if it might be Jewish, and certainly accounts for the misunderstanding that Frankenstein is German and that the action takes place in some Gothic castle with lederhosen-clad peasants banging at the door waving a variety of agricultural implements. It is this classic idea so beautifully sent up in Young Frankenstein. But Frankenstein is not German or Austrian. He is Swiss.

And moreover, he is French-Swiss. Well - sort of. At the beginning of Chapter 1 Victor says 'I am by birth a Genevese.' Two pages on, he says, 'I, their eldest son, was born in Naples'. So he was born in Naples, but his family is from Geneva (where it all began for Mary with that teenage nightmare at the Villa Diodati) and that is where he has spent most of his life.

He does go to university in Ingolstadt in Bavaria and that is where he creates the monster, but when the monster escapes into the countryside, it is a family of French exiles he happens across. This is where he learns to talk and, presumably, to talk French. Paradise Lost is being read in the cottage - but then so is Goethe's The Sorrows of Werther. It is not made clear whether these texts are translated or not, but when the creature meets Frankenstein on the alpine glacier, French seems the most likely language for that conversation.

My own spirit let loose from the grave

There has been a lot of speculation about how much influence Shelley had on Frankenstein. He certainly proof-read it, and he wrote an introduction to the first edition that lead some people to believe that he wrote the whole thing.

Mary and Shelley shared journals and discussed each other's work, and yet there does not seem to be any speculation that Mary influenced his work. Whatever the truth of his involvement it is unlikely that Shelley would have written anything do readable in the modern sense. It also seems very much a woman's book.

The least successful section of the book is the story within the story of Safie, the rather preposterous Arabian refugee whose story the creature learns while eavesdropping at the cottage of the equally unlikely French refugees, the De Lacey family. The only purpose of it seems to be polemical - to tell us about the iniquities suffered by woman at the hands of men (and Turkish men in particular) and of the harsh life afforded to outsiders. Safie is educated by the De Lacey's and the creature is educated along with her, learning to speak and to read.

Justine, the Frankenstein's servant, is wrongly accused of William's murder, convicted and hanged. Elizabeth is also murdered by the monster - on her wedding night (as punishment for Victor having destroyed the creature). Mary does not seem to like the ineffectual and saintly Elizabeth and seems to enjoy throttling this ideal woman. And yet, for all the radicalism of her beliefs - she was the daughter of William Godwin and proto-feminist Mary Wollstencraft - and their rock & roll lifestyle, Mary seems to harbour a desire for domestic bliss she was never likely to have with someone like Shelley.

Although the protagonists are male, it is partly there maleness that is under attack. Victor is determined to pursue his Mary had plenty of experience with selfish, arrogant, driven men, with her father, Shelley and Byron after all. Many people who met Shelley - Keats among them - did not like him and found him overbearing and grating. He seems to be often described as being on the verge of nervous exhaustion or hysteria (much as Victor is in the book), although the rather more macho Lord Byron seems to have enjoyed his company well enough.

There is a lot of Shelley in both Victor and the creature. Shelley was more than a little obsessed by the idea of demonic pursuit, of the supernatural double or doppelganger, and with a few changes Frankenstein could almost be read as a kind of Jeckyl and Hyde situation with Victor and the creature being two parts of the same character.

The whole of the novel is a series of stories within stories. Victor's story is told to Robert Walton, the captain of a ship trapped in the frozen seas of the far north. The creature's story is told to Victor on a glacier and then passed on to Walton via Victor. Safie's story is passed on by the creature to Victor and then to Walton. All these tales are then passed on by letter to Walton's sister. If the creature did not turn up at the end of the book, then it would be possible to believe that Victor was simply insane and had committed all the crimes attributed to the monster. After all he was known to all the victims: his best friend, his baby brother, his wife.


The Ancient Mariner was Shelley's favourite poem by Coleridge. The imagery of frozen wastes at the beginning and end of the book owes a lot to the poem and Mary quotes lines in Chapter 5 of the novel that seem to have struck a particular chord with her husband:

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear an dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth lose behind him tread.

There is also - as with the death of William - a macabre echo in the fact that the creature takes Victor from Walton's ship with the promise that he will erect a funeral pyre (though where he was going to get the wood from is not clear) and both creator and creature will be consumes in its flames.

Four years after the first publication of Frankenstein, Shelley's drowned (and horribly mauled) body will be burned on a funeral pyre on the shore of the Gulf of Spezia.

Fantasmagoriana

It is alchemy that is Victor Frankenstein's first passion. He stumbles upon a book by the famous German alchemist Cornelius Agrippa and is hooked. From there he goes on to read Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. There is no doubt at all that he was fascinated by the occult.

The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought. . .

At university his professors dismiss these alchemists and he turns his attention towards 'natural philosophy' or the study of the natural world. But even though he uses physics and chemistry and mathematics, his urges is the same. He wants to discover the secret of life and to defeat death. The search for an elixir of life was another mainstay of alchemical research.

Victor does make reference to studying anatomy, but this seems to be only because he needs to understand the human form as a part of his work. Even then, he says that he thought about making a lower life form but a kind of arrogance made him go all out for creating a human. Interestingly in James Whale's sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein's mentor, Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), shows off some homuncili he's created.

Although the Shelleys were very interested in science - Mary had been taken by her father William Godwin to lectures by Humphrey Davy when she was fourteen and Percy Shelley had experimented with electricity while at university - they were also fascinated by the Gothic and the macabre.

The ghost story-writing competition in the summer of 1816 that gave birth to Frankenstein took place in Lord Byron's rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva - the Villa Diodati. Byron, Shelley and John Polidori (Byron's travelling companion and doctor) held forth whilst Mary and her step-sister sister Claire sat apart listening. Electrical storms encouraged talk of galvanism but it also added to a charged atmosphere in which they read German ghost stories (collected under the title Fantasmagoriana) and frightened the wits out of each other. The Gothic novelist 'Monk' Lewis also visited that summer.

They were all very young, with mad, bad and dangerous to know Byron the oldest at twenty-eight. Shelley was twenty-four, Polidori twenty-one, Claire (who was pregnant with Byron's child) eighteen and Mary nineteen.

When Byron read an extract from Coleridge's Christabel, Percy Shelley had a fit and ran from the room screaming and had to be calmed by Polidori. That rainy summer of 1816 is also depicted at the beginning of Bride of Frankenstein, with Elsa Lanchester who plays the creature's mate, also playing Mary in conversation with Shelley and Byron.


Part science-fiction (a genre that arguably had never exited before) and part Gothic horror, Frankenstein also has a lot of Mary Shelley's life in it. The settings are almost all places that Mary herself visited. The novel was begun near Geneva where Victor's family lives. There is a fateful meeting with the creature on the Mer de Glace glacier at Chamonix - a place Mary visited that July. When Shelley had eloped to Europe with the then sixteen year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (and fifteen year-old Claire) in 1814, they had sailed back down the Rhine - a journey that Victor and Henry Clerval take on their way to England. As they floated down the Rhine, Mary and Shelley passed underneath Castle Frankenstein. The location is not used in the book, but the name seems to have caught Mary's ear. Castle Frankenstein actually accommodated an alchemist - Johann Conrad Dippel - but stories of his playing with cadavers seem to be a case of fiction influencing fact. Victor's character seems to have been superimposed onto Dippel's.

Death plays a big part in the book and in Mary's life. The nineteen year-old author also had more than her fair share of tragedy in her life. Mary's first child was premature and died shortly after. Between writing Frankenstein in 1816 and publication in January 1818, Percy's first wife Harriet and Mary's half-sister Fanny, both committed suicide. And things only got worse. Between the first publication and the second in 1831, Percy drowned at sea and Mary suffered the deaths of her baby daughter Clara and her young son William.

Authors never choose character names by accident - Victor is nicely ironic - and it seems strange that Mary chose the name William for the baby brother of Victor Frankenstein whom the monster murders. It certainly seemed a cruel twist of fate that her own son would subsequently die. It was also her father's name.

What would Freud have to say about all that I wonder?